CROWN HEIGHTS — Walking in Midtown this summer with a friend, Meir Kalmanson, 24, was bothered by something most New Yorkers barely notice — the outstretched hands of those hailing a cab.
“There’s just tons of people raising their hands and there’s nothing going on around them,” said Kalmanson, who was born in Brooklyn, raised in New Haven and now lives in Crown Heights. “They seemed so alone and I wanted to give them a high five.”
With two friends filming him, that is exactly what Kalmanson did, running up to cab-hailing strangers during rush hour in the Bryant Park area, high-fiving them and dashing away.
“I wouldn’t look back. I just wouldn’t. I was like, keep on walking,” he said.
On Sunday, the filmmaker and aspiring actor posted the video of his escapades on his YouTube channel. By Tuesday afternoon, “High Five New York” had almost 42,000 views.
And though Kalmanson said he made the video “just for kicks,” this is not the first time he’s had feel-good viral video success.
Last year, he starred in “Sleeping On Strangers On The Subway” in which he pretended to fall asleep on people sitting next to him on the train and filmed their reactions. The video, produced by the crowdfunding website Charidy, has about 1.5 million views and was inspired by a photo of a man sleeping on the shoulder of a stranger on the Q train.
“It’s sort of sweet, a nice message, and gets people to just feel good,” he said of that project.
Now, he hopes “High Five” will do the same, inspiring New Yorkers to “stop being so intense,” he said, spreading the mostly positive reaction he got while filming.
“Once in a while I’d get someone who was in a rush or something, but no — nothing negative, no middle fingers, no one cursing me out,” he said.
“I was making friends … they were having a good laugh,” he said.
