For frequent visitors to New York City, recent years have witnessed the new-found popularization of an unusual urban solar event dubbed “Manhattanhenge.” Also known as the Manhattan Solstice, Manhattanhenge is a celestial phenomenon that occurs biannually, when the sunset is perfectly aligned with the grid of NYC’s numbered cross-streets. Viewed from the eastern edge of the island, the borough’s steel canyons are illuminated with a radiant glow as the sun sets between the skyscrapers.
After several years of near-misses, I decided to extend a visit to the city to include this year’s Manhattanhenge. The portmanteau “Manhattanhenge” was coined roughly 12 years ago by noted American astrophysicist, TV host and director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson, finding a place in the current Oxford English Dictionary. Tyson had studied Manhattanhenge’s namesake, Stonehenge, and other, less-celebrated similar stone monuments in the British Isles as a youngster, and realized that the city’s urban planners had inadvertently replicated the phenomenon here at home.
Since Manhattan’s street grid is not perfectly oriented north-south but is rather tilted roughly 23 degrees off-axis, the key dates for Manhattanhenge are not its namesake’s summer and winter solstice but rather two summer days equally spaced around the summer solstice: one in late May, often coinciding with Memorial Day, and a second in mid-July, near Major League Baseball’s All-Star game. Tyson has speculated that future generations encountering the city’s depopulated grid will conclude that it stood as a tribute to a civilization in thrall to baseball and war.
This year, with Manhattanhenge falling on July 12, I made sure to schedule my New York trip around that date. For optimal viewing, it’s best to position yourself as far east in Manhattan as possible, with an unobstructed view across the island and over the Hudson River to New Jersey, where the sun sets in the west. For the best perspective, 14th, 34th and 57th streets are wide streets and include interesting buildings for a photogenic moment.
I chose the farthest eastern point in Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, the sliver of land in the East River only accessible by subway or the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tram. (Midway between Manhattan and Queens, it is considered part of the Borough of Manhattan.) The island’s Four Freedoms Park on its southern tip hosted its second July viewing festival complete with a jazz band and food trucks, free to the public but requiring registration to limit the number of revelers. The throngs in midtown must jockey for position in the middle of a rush hour big city intersection, but the park, the final work of Louis I. Kahn (perhaps known best locally for the Salk Institute in La Jolla) and a newly opened FDR memorial, affords a calmer approach. My family and I, never having traveled to Roosevelt Island before, decided to get there by the tramway rather than subway. It turned out to be a minor ordeal. At 6 p.m. when the festival opened we boarded the tram with scores of others filling every available space. The tram took off, 60 feet high above 2nd Ave heading east when, with a violent stop, the gondola began to swing back and forth on the sky cables. The conductor announced the tram was overloaded and reversed course, requiring more than half the people to exit. After the scare, and finally getting to the island, we came upon the ruins of Renwick Smallpox Hospital, designed in 1856 by the architect later responsible for St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Vassar’s most Hogwartsian buildings, now a beautiful ivy-covered monument to the storied past of Blackwell’s Island, as it was then known.
The vista from the park offered a spectacular and unique view of the skyline including One World Trade Center, the United Nations, and the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.
Alas — as every druid and hippie knows, but I just came to learn — the henge depends upon clear skies.
As the clock ticked to the magic moment shortly after 8 p.m., the sky grew overcast and my Instagram moment was rendered invisible. At least I wasn’t rained on, and I drowned my disappointment in some late-night cannoli and sfogliatelle.
As FDR once said, “There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.”
And to quote another great American icon, Linus Van Pelt — just wait ’til next year.
