Just when you think you have seen the lengths and depths of diversity, New York fills you in with some more. The park was crowded today. A perfect autumn day, the trees shimmering yellow red gold and a gentle breeze launching a leaf or two skyward brought out the couples and the parents and the ancients. Book readers down on the Heather Garden sub-level were wrapped up a little, you couldn't just sit for long without getting a chill. Lovers sprawled on the benches, here, she has her head on his lap, over there the pair is in some kind of Tantric twist with her inside leg up over his and his arms wrapped over and around her shoulders while trying to stretch his face down to reach her upturned mouth. No one else bothered to look.
Just then a man with a musket walked by. No one gave him a second glance either. "No, honey, dos is Spanish. In Italian, it's due. Try it." the mother is pushing a carriage with a four year old in it. A four year old who apparently is familiar with Spanish but now is learning Italian. The man with the musket stops at a place where five paths come together. He is wearing the uniform of a Continental Soldier, blue tri-cornered hat, darker blue vest, pale legging and deerskin boots. Who has the time for such hobbies? My question was answered immediately by the sound of gunfire.
We, the mother, child-student and the man with the musket, all made the corner into the open green area beyond the Heather Garden just in time to see the smoke from the muskets fade into the wind. Thirty other men, all with muskets and some with swords and sidearms, were lined up in formation. All had uniforms of some sort, which was in keeping with the American Revolutionary Forces, which fought the entire four year campaign against the British dressed in a hodge-podge of uniforms. There was a smattering of applause for the gunfire.
Today, I learn from the little poster at the front entrance to the park, (I always enter from down on Broadway and then run up the long hill.) is the 229th Anniversary of the Battle of Fort Washington. I think it is nice of New Yorkers to commemorate the solid whipping that they received that day. And it was the fourth good solid whipping the Continental Army had received in recent days, out flanked in Brooklyn, out gunned at Kip's Bay and chased up and down the hills of Harlem, the patriots were on the run. Washington had barely escaped the fort named in his honor before the Hessian troops crossed over from the Bronx, climbed the same hills that I run up on the North Side of Ft. Tryon and descended in a fury onto the ill-prepared defenders.
Washington and his men had been driven out of New York.
As I leave the front gate a man is translating the little sign about the Battle into Russian for a very old woman. "Here?" she asks in Russian, "When?" He reads the sign again. Oh, she is relieved, she thought it might be today.
