Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Halloween horror

Not to be a killjoy, but NYC's annual Halloween parade can truly be a nightmare for locals such as myself.  Due in part, I think, to incompetent management by whomever was in charge of the police presence, it was verging on impossible to cross 6th Avenue, which New Yorkers sometimes need to do. After yesterday's colloquium, our customary small group went to dinner somewhere east of 6th, so that we could get there (and the speaker could get back to her hotel) without needing to cross 6th.  But this meant that I had to try to cross 6th at about 8 pm in order to get home.

The distance I needed to cover is 0.5 miles according to Google Maps (I had thought it was a hair less). But getting home took 90 minutes, and I was lucky to make it home at all (it involved entering the NYC subway to use their tunnels, although I didn't end up having to take a train up and back).

Meanwhile, people were actually getting groped Trump-style by mask-wearing hooligans, hardly a surprise under the circumstances.  And no police person to whom I spoke had any idea how best to cross 6th.  (More precisely, several had definite ideas that proved to be incorrect.)

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