By Gus Saltonstall
If you walk down the staircase into Riverside Park at West 103rd Street, you will be met with a strange sight.
In the trees, bushes, and shrubbery near this entrance on Wednesday, there are dozens of hanging ornament-style gift bags. All of them are encased in sealed plastic bags, accompanied by either a red or green note and a brown box.
“Mysterious artwork,” one tipster sent to West Side Rag Wednesday morning in the subject line of an email.
The red and green notes all have the same of two messages, “Take” or “Take Another,” and in each case, the writing is printed backward.
The strange details don’t stop there.
On the outside of each small brown box within the plastic bag, there is a number. The number is written backward. The brown boxes also all have the word “fragile” written on the top, and this time, instead of the word appearing backward, the word is printed upside down.
And then of course comes the question, what’s in the box?
An egg. And not just any egg, but an egg shell that has been delicately drained of its insides. Additionally, the same backward number that is on the box then reappears on the egg, which has also had lines traced on it in colored pencil.
On Wednesday, West Side Rag found the ornament-style gift bags in one tree, a small bush, and a larger bush near the base of the staircase to the 103rd Street Riverside Park entrance. In total, there appeared to be around 30 of the bags.
During WSR’s visit on Wednesday, a Parks Department employee, who did not share his name, drove by and shed some light on the situation.
He told the Rag that the bags had been put up in recent days by a Parktender, who is a volunteer gardener with experience, who helps take care of an assigned area in Riverside Park. The employee added, though, that he had no idea what the eggs or numbers signified, or the reasoning for the backward and upside-down writing.
Of the three boxes and eggs that the Rag examined, nothing was in the eggs, and no sort of added note or QR code appeared in the boxes. The numbers on our eggs and those shared by the tipster were 32, 54, and 76.
Investigation ongoing.
Any theories or leads, please leave in the comments or send to info@westsiderag.com
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This is a husband and wife team that decided, partially, to clear out an apartment overrun with an older art project, to repurpose the materials onto a “new” art project — in green and red echoing the colors of the holidays — and put something out into the world. This, I learned from “the wife” who told me some of these details before I could ask more questions and she left the scene. (Also, I beleive, some of this coincided with his 85? birthday?).
It’s not art, it’s trash.
I’m going to do this with all my trash from now on.
What ever happened with the mysterious almond and pretzel piles that were appearing in the 70s?
In unrelated news, the West Side Rag office no longer wants for snacks
boocksbiz@aol.com
Courtesy of AI:
“an arithmetic sequence where the difference between consecutive numbers is 11. In this context, the sequence is 32, 43, 54, 65, 76. “
I’m all for public art and whimsy, but they lost me by leaving plastic bags in the park. There is already too much of it everywhere. It does not belong in our green spaces.
There’s a tree in Central Park between 65th and 64th with ornaments on it every year. Does anyone know the story? I love it!
Is that the pet memorial tree?
Eggshells are good for soil enrichment, also seems like a nod to Alice in Wonderland
My hypothesis: The surface pencil lines clearly imitate a notepad, encouraging people to write their own, one hopes good, messages. Could have some pencils, crayons, or markers nearby — or take the egg home, write on it, and return it. The reverse text gets attention; perhaps the artist is collecting the finished eggs as a public participation piece, perhaps in several parts of the city. Cool idea.
Update: just saw “Bob’s” comment. See, not the only person thinking similarly. Clearing out apartment though, not so much.
This is litter, get rid of it.