LINES: The Hospitality Industry Foundation of New York City, which was recently set up by a group of New York restaurateurs, sponsored a Saturday food festival in the Mall and Literary Walk area of Central Park, and never before have we seen so many New Yorkers in one place having so much fun. Seventy-two restaurants participated, each with a booth and each selling one or two dishes, sometimes brought over from the restaurant and sometimes prepared on the spot. The visitors ate all the food sold by the participating restaurants, watched musicians and other performers perform, strolled around, and were polite to one another. The police estimated that more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children were present. There were so many people at the festival that a lot of them had to stand in lines, sometimes up to forty-five minutes, just to pay five dollars for a book of twenty tickets that enabled them to buy servings of food ordinarily sold as spécialités de la maison at the participating restaurants.
Then there were long lines for the food. The line at the “21” Club booth (steak tartare) was about two blocks long. The line at Marvin Gardens (mussels marinière and tabouleh salad) was about three blocks long. The line at Beefsteak Charlie’s (slices of steak on a bun) was about four blocks long. There was a line at just about every food booth; and even to get a hot dog from a hot-dog vender who was not an official part of the food festival required waiting in line. No one seemed to mind.
We walked around, and here are some of the things we saw: a man juggling with cowbells and tambourines, a woman spinning a pie pan on a stick while doing somersaults, a man dressed in black doing magic tricks, a man dressed in black telling jokes about balloons, a clown, a mime, three flamenco dancers, a man playing an accordion, and a puppeteer. We met three boys collecting yogurt-cup tops at the Dannon Milk Products booth. They said that they had already collected seven thousand tops and that they hoped to have enough to be included in the Guinness Book of World Records. We stopped in at the Lost Children Area but didn’t see any lost children. We saw six stout Spanish-speaking women with purple jumbo rollers in their hair relaxing under a tree. Near the end of the afternoon, we stopped by the bandshell, where various groups were performing. There was a rock group called Lance, and it was well received. There was a group called the West Side Singers, unaccompanied by any musical instrument. Its members looked like a Better Citizens Committee. They tuned up their voices by singing a few bars of “I’ll Never
Fall in Love Again.” Then they sang all the way through “Spinning Wheel,” the old Blood, Sweat & Tears hit, with much vigor and in perfect harmony. By the end of it, they had lost a good many of the younger members of their audience.
—June 7, 1976