A third of a mile of cantilevered walkway over a running expressway, and once a year the best free seat in the city: barges on the black water, the skyline with its lights on, and eighty thousand shells going up in half an hour. The New Yorkers hang along the park wall and the railing, lit red, then green, then gold, then not at all.
Macy's first large fireworks show went up on July 1, 1958 for the store's hundredth anniversary, and became a Fourth of July tradition in 1976 for the Bicentennial. Recent shows fire on the order of 80,000 shells over about half an hour from barges in the East River and from the Brooklyn Bridge itself. The Promenade that watches it is a roof: a public walkway cantilevered over two stacked decks of expressway, opened in 1950 and 1951.
Source · Macy's 4th of July Fireworks, Wikipedia ↗
The Promenade on its cantilever over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the iron railing and the benches, the plane trees, the Brooklyn Bridge to the north, fireboats and barges on the river, the Lower Manhattan skyline across the water, and the crowd standing four deep at the rail. Mood: nine forty, everybody quiet. 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.