This brick wall in Williamsburg has become a hot spot for singles
Every New Yorker has been on a date where they feel like they’re talking to a brick wall—finding genuine connection can feel impossible in part because the city is filled with big egos and those suffering from chronic Main Character Syndrome.
But what if talking to a brick wall was actually a vehicle for finding love all along? That’s what is quite literally happening in a Brooklyn park, where singles are posting pictures of themselves in the hopes of finding their next big love.
RECOMMENDED: A forgotten carnival filled with colorful attractions is being resurrected at The Shed
The in-person dating app is set up at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, and you have to scan a QR code to make a suggested donation of $25 to begin. The participating singles then get two photos taken on a polaroid, and one of them is posted on the singles wall while the other is theirs to keep as a memory. The singles are also asked to fill out little “cupid cards,” as they’re being called, with information about them that might be relevant to a potential suitor, such as their age, gender and sexual orientation. They also list some identifying factors like “energetic” and “likes to travel.” The heavy lifting of pairing strangers together is up to the organizers—Vaishnavi Sesetty, 23, and Cyrus Belsoi, 25, co-founders of a dating app called Pique.
Pique is designed to “make dating fun and easy again.”
“Our hope is to revolutionize the way people approach love, romance, and dating and bring the human back in human connection,” Sesetty tells Time Out. “We currently have 1.5k users in the Pique community, and our next goal is to get funding so that we can continue to spread Pique and our mission throughout New York and beyond,” Belsoi adds.
The brick dating wall has been around for a little more than a month, and so far it’s proven to be a success: it’s clear that people are tired of endlessly swiping through anonymous profiles on apps, and we’ve finally caught on to the fact that we’re probably not going to find much meaningful connection that way. I spoke with Street Hearts host Tiff Baira in February about this very situation.
“I’ve even seen people start talking to somebody that they found attractive from the space from being here because they have such a confidence boost, you know sit down for 20-30 minutes and walk away with a date,” PictureManBob, the person who takes all the polaroids, told FOX 5.
Although the trend is a novelty in New York, there’s other parts of the world where these sort of dating endeavors are common practice. In Shanghai, for example, the People’s Park in the center of the city has a “Marriage Market” where parents and grandparents display their single children and grandchildren in the hopes of finding them reliable suitors.
You can check out Williamsburg’s singles wall every Saturday and Sunday from noon until 8pm and is located across the park’s tennis courts. Indeed, desperate times call for even more desperate measures, but once you find your match, it’ll all have been worth it.