I saw one of the waterfalls erected by Olafur Eliasson and the Public Art Fund last night. For a nicely literary review check out Roberta Smith’s article in the New York Times. Sadly, my camera was inadequate to capture the beauty of the art.

We started off under the Brooklyn bridge on the Brooklyn side around 7.

The water taxis were loitering around the falls so commuters could get a good dose of public art before heading to their Brooklyn homes. During the day, and from our perspective on the Brooklyn side the falls are a strange mesh of the mechanical and the natural.


We had dinner at Grimaldi’s (always delicious), and around 8:30 we started to walk across the Brooklyn bridge to Manhattan to get a look at the falls from the other side.

Passing over the falls you can see them through the gaps in the wooden slats of the path.

As you move it flickers like a flip book or a 19th century nickelodeon.

On the other side folks had gathered on the steps of Pier 17 to sit and watch the falls. They are best seen at night because the metal scaffold that holds them up disappears, and it seems as if the waterfalls are tumbling out of empty space. I imagined windows to another universe of water had opened at several places on the East River.