By Nick Shears
If you happened to be looking up on Friday evening you might have noticed the spectacular, if not peculiar, sky, composed of a strange cloud pattern set against a gorgeous sunset. The effect was awesome and unsettling to me, and I don’t think I was alone.
From where I stood on the corner of West 64th Street and Broadway, underneath One Lincoln Plaza’s sprawling arcade, people stopped in their tracks, craned their necks and forced their gazes upwards, a rare sighting in and of itself when most of our attention is monopolized downward by our screen devices.
Couples pulled at each others’ sleeves, beckoning and beseeching their partners to look westward, as if a UFO was hovering over the Opera house.
The clouds seemed to smother us in their closeness and stillness. These were not shifting clouds. These were congealed and caked and scalloped, like we were staring up into a sky-sized tub of the most gorgeous ice cream. It certainly had a hallucinatory effect, but also something sinister. Beneath the beauty were gleams of angst and foreboding. The weight and proportion of the clouds combined with the fire-colored sunset gave it a biblical intensity, the effect of which both sharpened the senses yet relaxed the bones in the helplessness confronted with nature, or, as some would say, a “higher power”.
Punctuating the auspicious air was the skeletal steel spire of the renovated church rising up a block away from a bed of scaffolding and black netting. And beyond that, I saw the dull red glow of the latest newcomer – another bank – one of the few retailers that can afford three sides of frontage on this mighty yet unforgiving commercial block, but not without seeing the warm, comforting smoke of spiced meat wafting from the defiant halal cart parked right in front of it.
Perhaps it was the incoming nor’easter, or the outgoing UN bluster, or the continuous drumbeat of AI doomsayers, but the strange sunset seemed like an appropriate stamp and seal on a strange time, and somehow made it all, in all its confusion, make sense.
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Great photos! Here’s one I took. Hope you can open the file.
file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/52/02/FCC46E80-2B79-4D84-A4A7-3DF2FA83943A/41287A89-B1C0-49A3-954C-7021DE4A58A6.JPG
Unable to open it. Did you post it anywhere like Insta?
Your link is not a web location.
This description of the show we experienced is brilliant . We watched it in CT as did friends in Maine and Mass. videos of New Yorkers emerging from the subways bathed in pink and smiles , double rainbow in Mass and yes the low enormous clouds breathtaking and a bit ominous . End of summer warning to take care of our lone , fragile planet
Hope they were mostly Mother Nature’s (and not MAN’S) creations.
Gorgeous! Both the photos and the writing!
It was spectacular and kind of creepy all at once. Wish I could post my photo here from up on Riverside Drive and see others as well. But thanks for your take on the bizarre celestial show!
Creepy? I thought is was utterly gorgeous. Privileged to see it.
Did enjoy from my living room window 1/2 block from Soldiers and Sailors.
Reminded me the Hudson River churning with angry waves before hurricane Sandy arrived.
Awesome!
Close Encounters!
It was mostly deep pink from my top-of-the-building vantage point and I thought of the old saying,
“Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning;
Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.”
So reddish sky at night before a predicted storm made no sense.
Gorgeous, though,
Sky that is orange — tighten your door hinge!
(I made that up.)
It was truly surreal, and left me and several friends awestruck. I don’t recall having seen anything quite like it, and left us all in a great mood while enjoying happy hour!
Red sky by night, sailors’ delight; red sky by morning, take warning! I too took delight in my sliver of sunset through the high rise construction outside my window. Thanks Nick for your beautiful description and photos.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning. Red sky at five? Shepherd’s pie!
My bedroom window faces East and the sky was a gorgeous intense shade of blue, with equally gorgeos pink clouds! Magical.
Yes, it looked like an Eastern sunset!
The first 2 pictures each look like a sky over the ocean, only minus the blues.
It was kinda spooky – like early Halloween. It reminded me of the orange sky from the Canadian wildfires in 2023. Very eerie to see this again.
Beautiful prose and pictures, thank you.
There was an amazing sunset Thursday night as well, seen from 72nd and West End
And what country’s flag is that flying at the same level as our American flag?!? I see yellow and white?? Is that an Iranian flag??
Oh crikey! A textbook response.
Girl, please. That’s the New York City flag.
THAT is your takeaway?
It was also erev, the evening of, Sukkot the Jewish holiday of living in booths— in sukkahs – symbolizing temporary shelters in the desert and celebrating nature’s harvest; this holiday comes after the Yom Kippur day of deep introspection, asking for forgiveness, and self forgiveness.
The sky was GLOWING with Energy!
I had to sit down outside until it was over, to experience it. There was a red glow that super-saturated everything that was pink or red. I can’t remember experiencing anything like it before