Street fair schedule
Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published in an undated (mid-Aug 2011) Street Fair Schedule – Reggae Shirt blog, with the same caption and detailed notes that I had written on this Flickr page.
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Every spring and every fall, a street fair magically appears along a one-mile stretch of Broadway in our neighborhood. I don’t know where the vendors come from, or where they store their booths and supplies; I have visions of them camped in squalid tents somewhere in the wilderness of New Jersey for the rest of the year, anxiously counting the days until they can invade the city once again. As I discovered on a billboard placed on the street at this year’s fair, the vendors sneak quietly from one neighborhood to another in the middle of the night throughout the spring and fall, from Manhattan to Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island.
Anyway, I’ve dutifully photographed the fairs for the past several years; if you’re interested, here’s the Flickr collection for the fairs that I’ve photographed over the past five years. It’s always the same: colorful, hand-made baskets from Central America, cheap socks, scented candles, specialty soaps, sunglasses, trinkets, and t-shirts. Booths selling reggae music, discount subscriptions to the New York Times and Daily News, and chiropractors earnestly telling passers-by how they can make anyone’s back feel good once again. Volunteer organizations beseeching tourists and residents for donations to some worthy cause, and a few street musicians making a racket with their over-amplified music.
And then there’s the food: gyros, sausage, candy apples, souvlaki, corn on the cob, lemonade, French crepes, hot dogs, calzone, funnel cake, zeppoles, shish kebab, pickles, olives, french fries, onion rings, spring rolls, and Thai food. For several, we were spared the fried twinkies, deep-fried oreo cookies, another such greasy atrocities — but the oreo cookies have now appeared, and I’m sure the rest will soon follow.
Just like the fair that I photographed last fall, it was all so "deja vu all over again" that I just couldn’t be bothered to photograph any of the food stands. The only thing that does change, year after year, is the assortment of people. So I set my camera to increase the likelihood of getting some decent "hip shots" (basically just a high ISO setting of 400 to 1,600, depending on the extent of sunlight during the afternoon, to force the auto-exposure mechanism to shoot at fast shutter speeds of approx 1/400 second), and just wandered along the street, pointing the camera at anyone that looked interesting. I took 500+ photos, and ended up with about 20 that looked reasonably interesting…
