Created to give visitors something to do after Lincoln Center’s tree lighting ceremony, the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District’s Winter’s Eve is a street festival that has taken place every year since 2000. But when preparing for the fair this year, the nonprofit organization's president, Monica Blum, discovered that the event would be losing its centerpiece—extensive on-site renovations had forced the performing arts campus to cancel its plans for a Christmas tree. Determined to keep the festival, Blum called in some favors, and last night the event celebrated the first tree erected by the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District.
Filling the Upper West Side section known as Lincoln Square—essentially Broadway between the Time Warner Center and 70th Street—the festival hosted thousands of people and featured a musical performance from actor Kevin Bacon, bites supplied by restaurants such as Bar Boulud, Center Cut, and Asiate, and live ice carving from Ice Sculpture Designs.
Utilizing its resources as a public-private partnership, Lincoln Square Business Improvement District asked McNulty Outdoors, the landscaping company that helps the organization maintain the area’s gardens, to donate a tree and the parks department to help install it. And Gracious Home, which has a store on Broadway and 67th Street, provided a big blue snowflake ornament to place on the top. Blum also worked closely with various city agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the New York Police Department, and the Department of Health and Consumer Affairs. Even the Department of Sanitation chipped in, supplying garbage cans to accommodate extra trash.
New to the celebration this year was a charity initiative with City Harvest, which encouraged participating restaurants to donate some of their proceeds from the night to the food rescue nonprofit and festival-goers to drop off canned food at a truck parked alongside the festivities.
Winter's Eve is regarded as one of New York's largest holiday festivals and typically draws about 5,000 people. The organizers of last night's event—who included Blum and her team, as well as PeKo Creative's Peter Kohlmann and Jay Weissman, and Christine Krische of CK Productions NYC—expected a similar turnout.
