Kid Takes Long Awaited Ride On Fish Carousel

Kina loves carousels. Her most beloved carousel, Jane’s Carousel, is temporarily inaccessible to us, for reasons of damaged ferry piers, and so we’ve really played up the Seaglass Carousel in Battery Park—a carousel she last rode apparently just before she could form resilient long-term memories. Because she can only barely recall the idea of a carousel made of giant fish, Kina has been really angling for a visit, attempting on Saturday to displace our beach plans for a visit to the heart of New York tourism. As a compromise, we agreed on Sunday, driving into the parking desert that is downtown Manhattan and hiking through the Financial District to Battery Park.

The tourists are back! It’s wild! People are all wearing foam Statue of Liberty hats, but no masks at all! We stood in line briefly as a dozen or so huge fiberglass fish twirled their way around their motorized pavilion, each occupied by a mildly disappointed tourist staring off into space. When the ethereal music finally stopped, all the fish simultaneously plopped to the ground, and the three attendants all screamed for people to leave the pavilion through the rear door. Then we got on.

The thing about Kina and carousels is this: She loves them so much that she cannot truly enjoy them once she’s on one. She spends the entire ride overwhelmed, contemplating the fact that she is actually on a carousel, soaking in the feeling of being on a carousel, uninterested in reflecting with us on her appreciation of that carousel. Kina rode in her fish, strapped to her mother’s lap, stunned and serious and unwilling to pose for photos. We twirled together for what felt like ten minutes, and the fish plopped down. The attendants screamed. We left.

Afterwards, Kina asked if we could ride two more times, but it was unclear if spending $30 to hang out in a line of sweaty, unmasked tourists in a semi-enclosed pavilion would be a reasonable bargain, and so we decamped to a nearby playground instead. She watered the trees. Nobody screamed.

Carousel!

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