To Market: Lincoln Center's Tucker Square

Sweltering subway platforms, broken laundromat change machines, and the reality of paying $3,000 a month to still have to share a closet with another person can start a New Yorker thinking, now and then, that maybe it wouldn't be so terrible to live in a place where a spare bedroom, or wasting less than an hour to cover a distance of 3 miles, or having access to a climate-controlled environment that makes it possible to arrive at a destination actually looking exactly the way one did when one left the house, aren't entirely unachievable things.

And sensing such flaggings of loyalty, New York City will, in return, occasionally let her inhabitants fall asleep inside a soupy, uncomfortable night and then bust out the type of knock-your-socks-off morning that forces everyone to step outside and think: Ah, yes! Now I remember why it is that I'm here...

This past Thursday, had you walked from the sun-dappled gelato stand at the foot of Central Park up to the Tucker Square greenmarket in front of Lincoln Center (named for the Metropolitan Opera tenor Richard Tucker, and which sets up each Thursday and Saturday at 66th and Columbus from 8 to 5), you might have thought the same thing.

Seventy degrees, sunshine, a light breeze, low humidity. The weather in heaven surely wasn't any nicer.

And had you stepped into that day after meeting with a roomful of Texans who had all marveled about the beauty of the weather, it might have been easy to feel momentarily smug and to forget that for 345 days of the year this finicky corner of the world is either too hot or too cold or too humid (as well as too expensive, too crowded and too filthy). Because when New York City gets it in her head to remind you of her charms — among them, the redesigned Lincoln Center, the take-away apple pies from Prospect Hill Orchards, and the raw-milk cheddar cheese from the Bobolink Dairy — there's really no place better to be.




























































































In addition to shoppers, loungers, readers, babysitters, and peach-squeezers, in attendance were:

• Prospect Hill Orchards {baked goods, jams, peaches, blackberries, apples, honey, maple syrup}
• Fresh Radish Farm {veggies, corn, beets, lettuces, eggplants}
• Bobolink Dairy {grass-fed cow's cheese, wood-fired breads, pasture-raised meats}
• Locust Grove Fruit Farm {apples, peaches, flowers}
• Cowberry Crossing Farm {organic and biodynamic vegetables, poultry and meats}
• Stokes Farm {lettuces, stunning heirlooms tomatoes, string beans, peppers, and other veggies}
• New Leaf Agricultural Community {plants}
• Baker's Bounty {breads, cookies, cakes and other baked goods}