Photo by Helmi Korhonen

All of Manhattan Is a Sundial

All of Manhattan is a sundial, casting shadows tall as skyscrapers. And every year, on an ordinary May or July eve, the sun lines up perfectly with the architectural grid of the island, spilling golden light over the asphalt like honey.

Dozens of camera-strapped onlookers, couples with intertwined palms, and city bikers caught off guard seem to get stuck in the celestial gleam, their feet stubbornly blocking traffic, their eyes sticky with warm wonder. They cram between the columns of high rises and watch as the sun sets in exact alignment, kissing the horizon at the perfect midpoint of the street.

This spotlit setting is called Manhattanhenge.

I’m babysitting tonight, and thought I’d bring the girls to see it. I picked them up at Lincoln Center before their parents slipped past the glass doors into a long awaited date night, half-luring the daughter duo to the sunlit street with the promise of a magnificent solar show (but mostly that of an equally magnificent ice-cream cone).

They now sit happily on the stoop, taking turns giggling and nibbling on their soft serves, which melt in unison with the day’s last licks of light. An old couple across the street shares an orange. A teenage boy attempts an ollie on his rugged skateboard, then notices the crowd and stops to watch the fading light. A swarm of photographers seem to spill over the edges of an overpass, their lenses all flocking toward the light like moths to a lamp. I observe the abundant audience, the thousand clicking shutters, the long shadows stretching into a stream of dimming ochre, mustard, and amber. A row of important figures, highlighted yellow with a celestial pen.

There’s something almost ancient about the event.

I’d read of the Salisbury Plain’s early humans, who were said to have observed the sun’s astral dance and built Stonehenge in alignment with the solstices. For the neo-Druids of today and a thousand bygone congregants, the Neolithic monument became a site for ritual and timekeeping. A place to observe the rhythms of the planet and celebrate its shifting seasons. (I might add that the true purpose of the granite structure still remains under much speculation and plenty of scholarly debate. It might be just as likely that its architects were, simply, very big fans of very big rocks.)

So too is Manhattanhenge a peculiar celebration of happenstance and planetary alignment. The sun lines up with Manhattan’s grid four times a year—twice for sunsets, twice for sunrises. But the timing doesn’t align with the solstices like at Stonehenge. The city’s rectilinear grid is rotated 29 degrees clockwise from true west. Thus, the full solar disc performs its centered kiss elsewhere on the calendar—roughly three weeks before and after the solstices on what are, by many measures, otherwise unspectacular days.

The magic of Manhattanhenge is its ability to stop the city in its tracks. A typical Tuesday is elevated to golden status. Commuters will break their routines for the simple act of watching the skyline, now blushing, haloed, red. A sun salutation.

Though if you ask any American, they might note that Manhattanhenge often occurs around Memorial Day in May and Baseball's All Star break in July. In an article for the American Museum of Natural History, NYC native and acclaimed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson hypothesizes the hypotheses of those who may be left to interpret our remnants: “Future anthropologists might conclude that, via the Sun, the people who called themselves Americans worshiped War and Baseball.”

I wonder if the urban planners of Manhattan, so keen to build up so far as to touch the sky, anticipated how their almost-east-to-almost-west layout would give way to this skyward urban ritual. In a canyon made of concrete and steel, standing steadfast atop stolen swampland, I am reminded of my connectedness to the star that sustains the planet, and the planet that sustains all else.

We take the uptown express home.

After ample play and supper, I tuck the girls into bed and sing a repertoire of hushed lullabies. As my soft alto fades, I wonder what mothers would have hummed to their babies after the solstice rituals at Stonehenge. The children ease into the borderland between wakefulness and sleep, their bunk bed still and twilight-blue against the glimmer of this strange metropolis.

My body, curled into the shape of a prehistoric fern, lingers in the corner of the bedroom, careful not to leave my guard shift until the girls have fallen into blissful REM. I let my gaze drift to an aerial view of a town, tufted into the rug in front of me. My eyes trace the outlines of crisscrossed roads, roundabouts, and childhood nostalgia.

On the rug, the remnants of play. A still-life scene of a witnessed sunset stands on display—a diorama of bedtime books stacked as buildings, scattered miniature cars now silent and honkless, and a watchful audience of Barbie dolls with knotted hair. The door behind me, slightly ajar, works as a night light. A beam of photons from the living-room lamp tiptoes through the gap in the doorframe. A diagonal column of soft gold lands on the rug, blanketing the toy landscape and sleeping children.

And there, placed at the horizon between the columns of make-believe skyscrapers, centered perfectly with the tender ribbon of light, sits a round bodega orange, illuminating an imaginary 72nd Street with gentle awe and ancient light.