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Graphic Artist Documents Union Square Weirdos
By
Ben Yakas
Published Nov 26, 2010
Modified Nov 26, 2010
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Nov 26, 2010
Modified Nov 26, 2010
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If you haven't spent much time in Union Square, then you might think that it's just filled with Greenmarkets, Holiday chachka vendors, and skateboarding hooligans. But you'd be missing out on the truly colorful, weird world of the square, which has whole subsections of strange inhabitants and regulars. All those various types of vagrants are memorialized on Normal Bob Smith's website, the anthropologist of Union Square.
“I started realizing there were all these different groups here, and it was all the same people every year,” Normal Bob, 41, told the Times. Normal Bob is a graphic artist who lives in Bushwick and who gained some fame/infamy thanks to his DressUp Jesus; he became smitten with the daily soap opera of what he refers to as his "Amazing Strangers." He gave over part of his website to celebrate the diverse crowd; last year, he created a hall of fame, crafting cartoon versions of the weirdest people, and then selected about half and put them on a postcard-size handout checklist to give people a chance to match each character with the right nickname and a new way to interact with the space.
Those characters include individuals such as Junky the Barbarian, Pretty Boy Jake and Green Graver Girl, and park regulars which include scenesters, peepers, fundies (fundamentalist Christian preachers), gravers (Goth-ravers) and Griswalds (tourists/gawkers). We wonder if he's run into any non-muggles lately.
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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