Pegasus, the mythological winged stallion, symbolized divine inspiration and boundless freedom. So did Joseph Gitnig, the itinerant minstrel who called himself Pegasus and delighted children and adults who gathered spontaneously for nearly two decades to see him perform at the Central Park Zoo.
Pegasus, the stallion, achieved immortality when Zeus transformed him into a constellation in the northern sky. Pegasus, the man, died on Sunday in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where he had lived since he gave up his New Age performance art in 1984. He was 95.
Tineke Gitnig-Bertrums, his wife and only immediate survivor, said the cause was kidney failure.
Pegasus — referring to him formally as Mr. Gitnig would be demystifying — epitomized a more innocent era, or at least one in which children, and adults, could be distracted and even entertained by a ballad, a soap bubble or a balloon and other less mind-blowing diversions than violent video games, Super Bowl halftime pyrotechnics and Las Vegas extravaganzas.
“I’m a poet, writer, actor, dancer, and I put it all together in the package of a clown,” he told The New York Times in 1974. He once told Dramatics magazine, “I’ve been called an astronaut of inner space, a cosmonaut of the imagination, bard of brotherhood, troubadour, rhapsodist, folklorist and the indefinable fool.”
Whatever you want to call him, he did more than entertain. After being arrested twice in the mid-1970s, he helped establish a precedent for free speech: For better or worse, according to Arthur Eisenberg, executive counsel of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the city agreed that performance art in parks and other public spaces is a form of free expression protected by the First Amendment.
“Creative Sharer” was how he described himself on the business cards that he handed out, hoping to be booked at children’s parties and other events as a way to supplement the up to $3,000 a year in coins and small bills he collected in a basket at the zoo. He made a living in the off-season as a clerk and shoe salesman.
He lived in a one-room apartment in a residential hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Pegasus was indeed a sharer, extemporizing with puppets, pantomime, rhymes; a tambourine, a harmonica and a lute; and improvised choreography — notwithstanding occasional competition from impromptu performances by the sea lions in the Central Park Zoo nearby, as well as the growing proliferation of other clowns who encroached on his turf as busking became more common.
Since he started performing at the zoo in 1971, he told The New York Times a decade later, people had become more accepting of street performers.
“Now you just put on your clothes and go out there,” he said. “But then you had ridicule and rotten eggs and people who thought you were crazy and came out of a flying saucer.”
Adults didn’t always pay him too much attention, but children were entranced.
“The children like me,” he said. “But the children have no voice and no vote. The children have no political power.”
But keeping alive the flower power he had cultivated in his act since 1965 became more challenging amid a darkening public mood as the nation agonized through the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and New Yorkers coped with vanishing municipal services during a fiscal crisis.
Joseph Leslie Gitnig was born on Jan. 26, 1930, in Philadelphia. His father, Morton Gitnig, and his mother, Edith Gitnig-Gold, who was born in England, owned a grocery store; his father also worked as a fabric cutter in the garment industry.
“At 17, Joseph felt called to use poetic language to give expression in written form to subjects drawn from creation,” according to the introduction to his book of poetry, “Unicorns in the Afternoon: Poetry of Promise” (2024). “At 20, he recognized himself as a poet. He became known as Pegasus.”
After graduating from high school in 1947, he enrolled in the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and later in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He moved to New York in 1953 and took evening courses at the Jefferson School of Social Science, which had been founded by the Communist Party to teach Marxism. He informally taught metaphysics and self-expression, and he published poems in the Brooklyn Heights Press and in San Francisco Progress.
He started performing in 1962, costumed variously as St. Francis, Walt Whitman and a pre-Columbian sun priest By 1971, he was Pegasus. He dressed like a court jester, in shorts and a garish vest, his pants festooned with bells, stars and hearts pasted to his face, birds and butterflies on his hat. He wore mismatched shoes.
In 1977, he was arrested twice for performing without a permit. He continued to perform, telling audiences: “What you’ve just seen is illegal. I’m a ghost. You didn’t see me. I’m a Fig Newton of your imagination.”
“I have no desire to be a martyr,” he said. “All I need to be happy is to see the looks in the eyes of these children who watch me perform. I’m not a politician. I’m just a clown.”
The arrests became a minor cause célèbre. Pegasus was represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the charges were dropped.
“I’ve decided that this is not an activity for which a permit is required,” Joseph P. Davidson, the parks commissioner, concluded.
Pegasus was inspired, he explained to Brian Kates of The Daily News in 1982, by the story of an angel who once upon a time told a little boy: “Go to the hardest, meanest city in the universe, to a city where people could be lying in the streets without homes, near death, and still be ignored. Go to the middle part of this city and express yourself. Just be true to yourself and do everything you do with love and faith.”
“What I’m trying to do is to represent in my person a kind of walking library and treasury and schoolroom and church and synagogue and mosque and temple and theater in which all may be themselves,” he said. “I’m trying to have a family outdoor theater where we can all celebrate a new age of brotherhood and peace.”
A near-permanent fixture at the zoo, he tried several times to parlay his gig into some kind of official paying role with the city. He asked during the Lindsay administration to be sponsored as a city good-will ambassador, paid only “enough money to live on.” During the Koch years, he proposed that he be appointed the city’s “official celebrant,” something like the town criers cities once had, or at least be paid a minimal stipend as a civil servant.
He received only polite brush-offs, and he continued to live on whatever people tossed in his basket.
In 1983, the Central Park Zoo was temporarily closed for restoration and Pegasus was burned out from busking. His wife, Ms. Gitnig-Bertrums, a KLM flight attendant who later worked with asylum seekers and in a day care center, was homesick. (His first marriage had ended in divorce.) So they moved to the Netherlands.
“Pegasus was left without a theater to perform in,” a fan said in a video tribute posted in 2009. “At the same time he was tiring of struggling to earn a living as a minstrel, and he could no longer proclaim his message of good will to a public that often could not understand such a simple truth.”
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