Elephants on Parade

Last night I stood in front of the Empire State Building and watched ten circus elephants march down the middle of East 34th Street. I know you're expecting the next line to be "and then I woke up" but this was no dream my friends.

The event is usually referred to as the Midnight Elephant Walk. Every year when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus comes to NYC, their mile long train can’t get to Manhattan so they park the train off the island and march the elephants and horses through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The animals and their handlers parade down 34th Street, across the island to Madison Square Garden where the circus is held. They do this around midnight so they don't disrupt traffic too much when they block of the street.

I actually didn’t even know about the event until 11:00 pm last night when I was at a friend’s house and someone mentioned it. No one else wanted to go because it was late and everyone had to get up early to go to work. Being unemployed I didn’t have any problem staying up late so I headed downtown armed with a scarf and my camera.

My camera isn’t the best for taking pictures at night so this is the best picture I came away with. The elephants lumbered by holding each other’s tails in their trunks like a line of kindergarten kids holding hands on their way to lunch.




The event tends to attract a lot of animal rights activists and others protesting the treatment of the elephants and other circus animals so seeing those crowds out in full force was exciting. I’m not going to wade into the pool of controversy surrounding elephants and the circus and I’ll leave the moral questions involved to those who are more educated on the issue.

I also tried to get a good video of the event but again my camera didn’t do very well so my thanks to “BRADbury creme egg” for posting this video on MySpace.

2009 NYC Barnum & Bailey Elephant Walk