Sidewalks

What do you do when more people want to come into your store than the store can comfortably accommodate? Some East Village store owners make the effort to organize those waiting outside, others let people mill about.

This was the scene outside Big Gay Ice Cream a week or so ago:

Queueing up for some scream.

You can see in this case that it's not hard to pass the group. They even stand by the curb.

The alternative is that employed by Cornerstone, a popular restaurant on Avenue B and East 2nd Street:

Amassing for some brunch

Churches also employ the sidewalk-blocking method, but I only thought of this now, and didn't get a picture of people outside a church. Theaters, too. Lots of places, actually.

Either way, I've determined that it's no big deal. It's easy to walk through a group of people, and perhaps say "Excuse me".

I do think people standing on the sidewalk should be more aware though, but I've always thought that about people walking too. They're just not.

A friend of mine recently told me that he has a plan: he's not going to move for people who aren't looking where they're going. I told him I've done this many times in all my years in New York, and it doesn't work: 1) The person being bumped does not think "Wow, I just got bumped because I wasn't looking where I was going. I should start looking!"; and 2) The person being bumped receives only one bump in the day, the person doing the bumping receives dozens of bumps. It just backfires.