The triumphal arch at the head of the parkway, the museum and the library beside it, the West Indian parade coming up under the elms: feathered masqueraders, sound trucks, flags of every island, the works on the arch.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out Eastern Parkway in the 1870s as the first road to be called a parkway. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch at Grand Army Plaza, designed by John H. Duncan, was dedicated in 1892. Brooklyn's West Indian American Day Carnival parade has come up the parkway on Labor Day since 1969, after earlier Caribbean carnivals in Harlem.
Source · NYC Parks, Grand Army Plaza ↗
The Soldiers and Sailors arch with its bronze quadriga, the oval plaza with the fountain, the columned Beaux Arts museum, the library shaped like an open book with its gilded doorway, the six lane parkway with elm malls, the costumes and the trucks. Mood: carnival monday. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.