There is more than a few things you can always count on when summer comes to NYC's parks: crowds, ice cream trucks, poets with a comically impractical typewriter, the guy who makes toddler-sized bubbles out of a hula-hoop, and dance crews. You know, five-to-10 really fit guys who corral tourists and line them up and then perform circus flips over their heads. And then open tote bags for your cash donations, sometimes receiving hundreds of dollars in just a few hours of work. Three, four performances each afternoon.
The family members who make up the High Flyers of Battery Park have been performing in the same stretch of sidewalk between Castle Clinton and the Bosque Fountain for more than 20 years, mainly because the thousands of tourists who disembark the Statue of Liberty Ferry make for a dependably wide-eyed and generous audience.
In August, 2018, I spent time with Muggzy, Omar, Peter, Tevin, Clarence, Mully, and little Jaden to document their experience.
