The Green Market was fully functional. During the winter of the year 2000 I spent a number of days in the Barnes and Noble bookstore on 17th Street. The coffee shop windows on its 3rd floor overlook Union Square, and I was drawing the downtown skyline in preparation for a large oil painting of that view. Before this, Barnes and Noble had simply been a place from which to order books, but during that winter I was a part of its everyday life. It is a wonderful place in which to spend special time, and since the central theme of my work has been to show the diversity of the people of N.Y.C. this was the perfect place in which to work.