As the sun dipped below the horizon in perfect alignment with 42nd St., sending waves of orange across skyscraper facades, tricking the eye with visions of evening traffic headed into fiery oblivion, a man approached the crowd that had assembled on Tudor City Place to stand in awe of the spectacle. “What is this?” he said.

“The sunset,” someone answered.

“I used to live on 106th Street. You could see it every night there,” the man said. He walked away.

Such is the narrow appeal of Manhattanhenge, an astronomical phenomenon that’s at once cosmic and provincial.

Manhattan’s so-called “east-west” streets actually run 30 degrees clockwise of true east and west, hewing to the contours of the island. (So “450 West 57th St.” is technically “450 West-northwest 57th St.”) Twice a year, Manhattanhenge¹ occurs when the azimuth of the sunset aligns with that off-kilter angle of the city streets—300 degrees, to be more precise.

In practical terms, it’s the moment when you can stand on the east side of the island and gaze all the way across the city to watch the sun set.

Tudor City Place, a tiny road that runs along the Tudor City apartment complex, has become a prime destination for ‘Hengers. It’s on the east edge of the city, and it crosses one of the wide major cross-streets (42nd), both prerequisites for optimum viewing. There are a number of points in Manhattan that fit that bill, but Tudor City Place has the benefit of being a quiet overpass, so you don’t have to dart between speeding cars to get that perfect up-the-middle shot.

Manhattanhenge isn’t such a marquee event that the Tudor City Place crowd was overwhelming when I visited last Thursday. At its peak, the group numbered a comfortable 90 or so, and many of those were there by accident. Andrea, a Tudor City resident, told me, “I looked out here and thought, ‘What are all these people doing in my area?’” She joined us with her, for lack of a better word, boyfriend (“Um, I guess you could call him that”) and stood on the outskirts of the pack, staring partly at the sunset and partly at these strange people who had assembled for an event she still didn’t entirely understand.

It seemed most of the attendees had gotten word of Manhattanhenge in the same raggedy fashion, as there’s no central clearinghouse for obscure Manhattan-only astronomy events. Some had been told by friends; others had heard about it on Gothamist or other blogs. Preschool director Emily Shapiro read a blurb in AM New York and and decided to come so she’d “have something to talk about with 4-year-old kids.”

Ariel Cohen’s interest was piqued by a source close to my heart: game shows. “I was watching Jeopardy! one night, and a contestant, Michael Pollock², said that he was the foremost authority on the Manhattan Stonehenge.” Cohen said last Thursday was his third Manhattanhenge, all of which he’s viewed from Tudor City. “Next year, I’m thinking about watching from Long Island City,” he said. There were nods of agreement. The conventional wisdom is that Manhattanhenge ought to be viewed in Manhattan, but the unencumbered sightlines of the L.I.C. high-rises across the East River were enticing.³

When the sun came into view, the masses raised their arms, cameras in hand, and squinted into LCD viewfinders. The early birds who had snapped up the best spots at dead center fiddled with digital SLRs or, in the case of a Fox 5 crew, a lumbering Betacam. Curious latecomers on the outside mostly had to make do with cell phone cameras, unprepared as they were for this titanic moment in astronomical history.

A few minutes of reverent snapping commenced. Then, abruptly, the sun passed the horizon. “Is it down?” an elderly man asked. He answered himself: “Yup.” A few people applauded, and from then on it was indistinguishable from any other sunset (the type you might be able to view from, oh, I don’t know, 106th Street).

Still, there was a pride among newfound friends that we’d witnessed this convergence of urban and solar planning. People often accuse New Yorkers of believing that the world revolves around us, but that’s not quite right. Twice a year, the sun does, too.

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1. “Manhattanhenge” is one of those great neologisms, like “[insert topic of scandal here]-gate,” that makes sense only if you don’t think about it very much. It gets the gist across perfectly, but then, wait a minute—Stonehenge isn’t located in “Stone.” ↑

2. I couldn’t find any contestants by the name of Michael Pollock in recent Jeopardy! history, but Cohen probably meant Michael Condouris, a Manhattanhenge admirer who placed second on the June 8, 2007 episode of the show. ↑

3. Cohen gave a shout-out to his wife and newborn child, which I promised to include, so here it is, shouting out. ↑