Four days after the earth here shook unexpectedly, New Yorkers headed to beaches, rooftops, parks, and sidewalks Monday to stare at the sky and even put down their phones and talk to each other as they waited to see the moon block nearly all of the sun in a rare eclipse that delighted people across all five boroughs.
Mike Rey was off from work and made a beeline for the boardwalk at Beach 44th Street in Edgewater, Queens on the Rockaway peninsula to watch with his wife, Johanna, 41.
“I was late to the game [in 2017],” the 33-year-old said of the last eclipse that was visible here. “I was working, missed it, felt like a loser.”
Between glances to the sky he peeked at his phone, where NASA’s live stream of the celestial event was streaming.
Ken Gopal, 45, and Bibi Hafez, 52, watched from the beach with awe, using a viewer out of a Frosted Flakes cereal box.
“It’s right over the ocean, you just can’t beat it,” Hafez said.
Arya Martindale, 5, had learned about the eclipse at her pre-school, her dad Justin Martindale said. On the boardwalk, she drew chalk drawings of what she saw through her glasses.
“A solar eclipse is colorful,” she said.
Mayor Eric Adams has warned New Yorkers about the danger of looking at the sun without protected glasses and city agencies and non-profit organizations handed out eclipse glasses over the last few days. Some places ran out of them as demand grew in the lead up to Monday.
The health department warned motorists driving in the afternoon to use headlights, and to slow down to avoid any distractions.
“I know that people think that you could just look up at it. It is not a major issue, but it is,” the mayor said last week.
On Monday, Mayor Adams watched while wearing specialty glasses alongside senior citizens and kids on a balcony of senior housing on the Lower East Side. He later said that the solar eclipse was a metaphor for life.
“No matter how much darkness would come, light will shine through and the sun is going to come back out,” he told reporters.
“Every dark moment, the light just keeps coming through and the sun keeps coming back out.”
Raphael Munchez, Jr., 4, watched nearby alongside his classmates from CPC Little Star of Broome.
“The moon is gonna cover the sun,” he told THE CITY about what he thought would happen, although he wasn’t sure what it would look like. “I have no idea.”
He later said the sun looked like a “broken wheel” and talked about his favorite chips, Sun Chips.
In Battery Park, dozens of tourists and nearby workers gathered to experience the rare, cosmic event, doing their best to cover up their cell-phone cameras with their filtered cardboard glasses to get the perfect shot. Others passed their glasses around to friends and even strangers eager to take a look.
As the partial eclipse neared its peak, around 3:25 p.m., some in the crowd cheered as it got noticeably chilly.
Joan Font and his wife, Consol Bou, of Barcelona, Spain, planned their visit to their daughter and grandchildren, who live in New York, around the eclipse. They last witnessed a partial eclipse as schoolchildren in 1958, through homemade tinted glasses.
“It’s a striking experience,” said Bou. “It doesn’t happen every day!”
Roberta Correa, 26, and her grandmother, Marcily Sousa, 75, had no idea when they booked their New York vacation from their native Brazil several months ago that they would be able to witness something even bigger than New York City. In a trip that has so far included traipsing around Brooklyn and Soho, they said the eclipse ranks first on their list of favorite experiences here.
“I’m just gonna sit and watch – it feels very surreal, if I’m being honest, like I’ve never experienced anything like that,” Roberta said. “It’s also amazing to see just everyone out in the street experiencing that. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t that.”
Dozens of people also flocked to the East River to watch the eclipse in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
“It’s awesome. I’m excited for the darkness and animals going crazy,” said Brooklyn resident Alyssa Ritch-Frel.
Some city workers took a break to step outside and watch the eclipse, like Allegra Pratt, a Department of Transportation personnel employee.
“It’s a little weird cause you witness something shifting,” she said. “We survived the earthquake, I guess we might as well survive this.”
Offices and schools emptied early as New Yorkers took to the precious open spaces here to look up and take in something even bigger than this vast city. At Columbia University, brothers Dash Smith, 8, and Myles, 7, joined their dad Anderson, the school’s assistant director for research compliant education, for the astronomy department’s viewing party.
“It was amazing,” Dash said, already looking forward to the next eclipse in 2044.
“When I’m 28, I’m going to go back to the fields to watch the solar eclipse again.”
Claudia Irizarry Aponte, Ben Fractenberg, Gwynne Hogan, Samantha Maldonado and Tazbia Fatima contributed to this report.