Double Your Pleasure

In America, we love numbers, bargains, more, and doubling. Two is such a convenient multiple for the real world - double your pleasure, double your fun, double your money, double your results, double down, double trouble.

Washington, D.C. was the first big city I visited, and the Washington Monument was the first tall structure I ever saw. My obsession with it knew no bounds. I had many facts memorized, such as that it was 555 feet tall and 55 feet across the base.
One of the beautiful things about the Washington Monument is positioning near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I love gazing in it and seeing the monument's reflection, getting a visual bargain: two images for the price of one.

When I moved to New York City, Greenwich Village was my first home, and the Washington Square Arch became the natural and perfect object for transference of my monument fixation. It was not as tall, but it was white, stone, also named after our first president, and had a lot of its own history and character. It also became a symbol for the neighborhood, with its bohemian and iconoclastic history, of which I believed myself a member.

In the previous design of Washington Square Park, prior to its recent renovation, when the fountain was turned off, the water would drain completely within minutes. However, the new fountain's system recirculates the water, and after being turned off (at approximately 10:30 PM), a shallow pool several inches deep remains. If the wind is light, the water stills and in a short time becomes a wavy mirror, reflecting the arch, any individuals sitting on the perimeter of the fountain and, if you are positioned correctly, the added bonus of the Empire State Building framed inside the arch itself.

If you're in Greenwich Village at night, take a stroll by the fountain, and the odds are very good that you may double your pleasure :)