THE MOJITO MAN.(unlicensed drink peddler in Central Park)

A hundred and fifty summers ago, New York City annexed a swampy unpromising seven-hundred-and-seventy-eight-acre tract that was home to hog pens, bone-boiling plants, and threadbare settlements. It became Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's astonishingly resilient experiment in rus in urbe, and New York--a city that never misses a good marketing opportunity--is not letting the anniversary pass unnoticed. The festivities have included a platoon of Revolutionary War troops camping on the Great Hill and a "BioBlitz" in which bird-watchers, bat-freaks, lepidopterists, ichthyologists, and many other -ists spent twenty-four hours combing the wilds of the Park for flora and fauna.

One species that has been overlooked in all these festivities, however, is that of the unlicensed peddler, despite its having subsisted and at times even thrived ever since the Park commissioners fretted, in 1863, over all the requests for permits to hawk "velocipedes, perambulators, Indian work, tobacco, segars." Just as worrisome was the problem of straight-up underground commerce: there were reports of elderly women selling unsanctioned tea and cakes.

Today, the unlicensed peddlers who have been selling drinks in the Sheep Meadow for at least a decade--a skeptical crew of guys whose street names are Bangladesh, Puerto Rico, Panama, Africa, and Hercules--agree that even though their colleague Junius is more or less a Meadow rookie, he is certainly one of the most enterprising men ever to vend without a license in the Park, and not just because he has expanded his operations far beyond the Meadow itself. Junius's innovations have included fresh mojitos, pina coladas, mango daiquiris, margaritas, chicken wings, and shrimp cocktail, all of which he prepares from the back of his red Mongoose Rockadile mountain bike. At one time or another, he has transported on that bike large quantities of ice, fresh sprigs of mint, a charcoal grill, and a battery-powered Black & Decker blender.

For a while, Junius, who is forty and favors Hawaiian shirts and baggy basketball shorts, sported a straw hat, because, he said, "it adds to the cabana feel." Lately, he hasn't worn the hat-- too easy for cops and park rangers to pick out. He played cornerback in high school in Linden, New Jersey (and on a club team at Rutgers), and says he got busted in the Park only once, a year and a half ago, after an elaborate chase involving many authorities.

On the Great Lawn the other evening, all the ...