They’re Playing Basketball
When I’m in NYC, I LOVE spending time in Greenwich Village! The people watching is world class (I love people watching), great restaurants & bars & most of all it’s the home of Washington Square Park, which is my most favoritest park ever!
There’s always something going on at Washington Square Park; fights, naked sun bathing, street performances of all kinds, transvestites of every flavor & the occasional street deal (fill in the blank).
One of the more interesting things about The Village is the West 4th Street Courts aKa “The Cage.” The Cage is a public basketball court were you can watch some amazing street ballers get their grind on.
If you know me, then you know that I am no sports fan but when at The Cage, I’m intrigued by the ferocity of the players who appear to take the game so serious like major things are at stakes other than their Black man egos.
The players are one thing but the on-lookers and surrounding spectacle of passers by is another. You see & hear some of anything just by standing there.
On my August trip to NYC after coming up from the subway a major game was popping off and the spectators were going hard for the game. It was like some TV shit. Fascinating!
It’s easy to see why this small patch of asphalt is world renown. And yeah, I still am not a sports fan. I’m just saying.
West 4th Street Courts History:
These courts serve as a basketball mecca not only in Manhattan, but far beyond the City lines as well. Home to “the Cage,” a smaller-than-regulation court that hosts intense pick-up basketball games, the asphalt is also the site of a popular tournament that draws players from around the world.
The park was born out of the need to superimpose a new street system over the haphazard West Village street layout. Since its colonial beginnings, the neighborhood had evolved in an unregulated fashion from marshland to farmland and then from a rural suburb to a densely settled residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhood full of crooked streets. The revolutionary 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, which introduced the grid pattern that laid out the streets and avenues of Manhattan, had little immediate impact on Greenwich Village. Intended to provide a system for the orderly development of land between 14th Street and Washington Heights, the grid left the crooked streets of the West Village intact until the advent of the automobile necessitated smoother traffic flow through Manhattan. (Read more here: nycgovparks.org)