THE MAGIC of fairytales is alive and well here in New York. Oh, how I have always loved looking at the wondrous, illuminated winter windows of New York City.
A friend and I met up on Fifth Avenue at Lord and Taylor. This year’s theme was A Few Of Our Favorite Things.
Shimmering frosted white Victorian cuckoo clocks, an enormous gingerbread house held up by a legion of moving gingerbread cookies, the charm of Parisian sweet shops, a wintry mansion enveloped by gently falling snow, animated by random latticed doors and windows opening and revealing charming treasures inside.
A snowy red robin, frolicking snowmen, a sled, a child forming a snow-angel, a shiny candied apple red train on its journey.
You never know what each opening window will give you a peek at.
It was late night by now. A good time to go, after most of the tourists had left the streets that just hours earlier were teeming with lines upon lines of people. It’s a beautiful cold New York night. Clean and wet after a recent rain shower.
I hadn’t worn the right shoes. Earlier in the day it was warm. The temperatures were plummeting, and fast. I was on the lookout for a store that might still be open in order to purchase some warm socks. We passed a homeless person on the street. My friend had a pair of gloves ready in her bag to give it to a homeless person. Rabbi Alan Schwartz, her shul rabbi, makes a point of distributing them to his congregants, encouraging them to be sensitive to the plight of others, arming them with tangible help to be given on the spot.
I finally find a shop where I purchase two pairs of thick warm socks. The homeless person is no longer there, though.
SO WE continue up to Saks Fifth Avenue. Wow! It had been years since I had last come to view the windows. The intervening years have certainly upgraded the quality of the winter window displays. Rather than passive, dressed-up holiday fashion, this was more like a mini Broadway show!
I came upon Saks corner window. Illuminated was a monochromatic scene in hues of creamy whites accented by cold silver: a queen in an icy palace, replete with chandeliers strung by pearls, multitiered frosted cakes, elegant candelabras lit by candlelight, soft snowy pyramids of upright mounds of bon bons, its height a full croque-en-bouche.
In elegant looping letters the window reads: The Winter Palace.
The other windowed corner of Fifth glowed with yet another tiaraed queen, another creamy white scene. This time she is seated at a very grand piano. Another window: more playful. A roaring bear and a ballerina in repose, their resting position firing the imagination, inspiring a picture of the bear and the ballerina, perhaps having just completed pirouetting as partners?
I turn from the corners to the main window display. Late one midwinter night, I dreamed I had the power, To see the earth’s winter wonders, Like the icy Eiffel Tower, reads the window.
Next, a Chinese empress is suspended floating in the air above her icy wall, with the following caption: Further east in China was a most impressive setting, a great wall made of ice blocks, for protection and for sledding. Next is a frosty Taj Mahal, and so on and so forth a collection of icy wonders of the world. Just as I am marveling at the creativity, beauty and incredible artistic execution, the music that has been piped onto the street in full glory is getting louder. The next thing I know, the face of the Saks building is slowly, incrementally, being lit up in tune to the rising music. Before my eyes the building is transformed into a lit palace of blue and gold. The music from Silver Bells is crescendoing, the palace is complete.
WE CROSS the street toward Rockefeller Center to join the people huddling in the cold, cupping hot drinks, their phones above them to capture the truly magical theatrical scene. We watch it one more time before turning to Rockefellers famous rounded skating rink.
Next, Henri Bendell’s chocolate and white striped awning, and perhaps, across the street, to Tiffany’s? In the spirit of the perfect New York night, we had after all just picked up an Audrey Hepburn portrait for five bucks.
Meandering up the Avenue as the night kept getting colder and colder, on my right is a charming reading tableau of sculpted-in-white characters in different poses coming into view. Oh, I guess Barnes and Noble is in on the windows, too. I had thought it was more a fashion department store thing. A child cozily ensconced in a bunk bed within a tree house . . . dreamily reading, vintage balloon sticks topped, alternatively, by balloons or actual books, The Little Snow Plow and From Grit to Great.
Old records and books, a café scene, books and more books, all with characters embedded in the scenes conveying the joy of reading. The last window has a figure suspended horizontally high in the air, reading . . . and down below, directly in the space underneath her, is a woman wrapped in a plaid poncho, cuddling with a black dog, the book Those Who Save Us in her hands.
I take a second look.
She is placed so perfectly in the scene.
Now I notice all the filthy scrunched newspapers around her. The piles of junk. Its like she is a live version of the silent inanimate objects displayed in the window. The live homeless person.
She too, a caption might well have read, enjoys reading.
She is integrated so seamlessly, its hard to tell the difference.
We get into a short conversation. She doesn’t want to go to a shelter. She doesn’t want the socks.
She recommends the books she is reading, a Holocaust book no less. It’s a powerful book, she says, then recommends a bookshop around the corner where books are sold at a dollar a piece. We wish one another a goodnight and I walk on.
I am trying to catch up with my friend to meet up at Henri Bendell’s.
Even with my new pair of socks, my shoed feet are practically frostbitten by now from the wet night. I really should have worn boots.
Now on my left lies yet another man on the ground, pushed against a wall. I have been here since 1982, shouted a homeless man I passed on Central Park West only a few weeks ago, his words screeching in my ears again.
This man here on Fifth Ave, he is fast asleep. So used to the street, to the cold. He is unfazed. A torn cardboard box lies near him with a hand scribbled note and a smiley Please Help stuck to it. The box, since he has drifted off, is filled by strangers; a miniature rounded felt emoticon, a candle, a striped candy cane, a hat hanging at the corner.
Like the surprising and revealing windows of the snowy mansion in the Lord and Taylor display, New Yorks Fifth Avenue revealed another window of New York tonight.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
