It may not rise to the level of the kind of Sunday Styles article that makes you want to flee New York, but it’s almost as obnoxious. “Six Figures? Not Enough!”:

There was a time not long ago when earning six figures was a significant milestone among upwardly mobile professionals. If you were young and single in one of the nation’s big cities, you could live in a building with a doorman, drive a European car, eat at fine restaurants and vacation in Jackson Hole. For married people it meant a suburban home and college savings accounts for the children.

Beyond the lifestyle, $100,000 was a psychic achievement; it meant joining the meritocratic elite. The prospect of “six figures” kept white-collar workers toiling for 20 years, confident that hard work would be rewarded and that the American social contract was securely in place.

Certainly $100,000, which is more than twice the national median household income of $43,527, is still a princely wage in most of the country, placing you in the top 5.2 percent of American wage earners with full-time jobs, according to the 2000 census. Even in New York City, only 7.5 percent of full-time workers make that much. But $100,000 isn’t what it used to be. It has been devalued, in the practical sense by inflation and psychologically because it is now a relatively common salary for newcomers in fields like law and banking. For today’s executive strivers in the more affluent cities, there is a new grail: $200,000.

When you read these sort of Sunday Styles articles, you inevitably wonder who these people are; it seems that everyone but you (and the writer) are in on the joke. But now we know — these articles are aimed at only 7.5 percent of the city. It’s then that you realize that the article is riding that thin line between obnoxious and mocking. And this time we’re on the safe side of mockery! See in particular:

“It’s the new black,” said Bill Coleman, senior vice president in charge of compensation at Salary.com, an online career service based in Needham, Mass., that tracks executive pay. “There’s a lot of bunching between $100,000 and $150,000. That’s the vast majority of the people who used to aspire to $100,000. Now they are aspiring to $200,000 or $250,000.”

“It’s the players,” he added, echoing a common sentiment, “who make $200,000.”

Where does the money go? It’s easy:

Adjusted for cost-of-living inflation in the New York metropolitan region, a $100,000 income in 1987 would be worth about $170,000 today. And yet it still seems that another $30,000 or more is needed to be a “player.” Part of the explanation may be the almost perverse escalation in the price of commodities favored by upwardly mobile professionals: whether $170 Diesel jeans, which have replaced $30 Levis; $3.95 lattes from Starbucks versus 25-cent coffee from a deli; or the must-have $449 iPod that supplanted the must-have $75 Sony Walkman of the Reagan years.

To think that people once paid $75 for a Walkman — it just boggles the mind. And with that I’ll slink back into the humdrum hand-to-mouth existence of the other 92.5 percent of the city . . .

As the snow comes down, workers are apparently dismantling Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates, which closed yesterday:

Art is long, and life is short, and city contracts are even shorter. The dismantling of the 7,500 gates was to start first thing today, and, Jeanne-Claude said, in keeping with her and Christo’s agreement with the city, it all has to be gone by March 15. That schedule is fine with her. February was the only month the project would work, she said, when the trees are leafless and row upon row of color can be seen in every direction.

The dismantling will be easier than the installation because there will not be any need to be careful. The 5,290 tons of steel will be melted down and recycled - “The aluminum is going to become cans of soda,” Jeanne-Claude says - and the fabric will be shredded and turned into carpet padding. Then all that will be left of “The Gates” will be the memories, and the T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, watches and baseball caps.

Typical Times color describing the scene yesterday:

It was a bright sunny morning, but cold, and the park was crowded, considering the weather. There were the usual joggers, cyclists and Chinese wedding ceremonies, but also, of course, the New Yorkers and tourists coming for a first or last look.

Everywhere she walked, Jeanne-Claude was followed by a constant stream of thank yous and butchered mercis.

I kind of love the Post articles about the weather. “Bundle Up For a Wintry Weekend,” they warn today:

The snowstorm may be over, but don’t look for any spring-like weather this weekend.

Or next week, either.

Temperatures will hover around the freezing mark today and tomorrow, with northwest winds of 5 to 10 mph making the air feel like it’s in the 20s.

There will also be a chance of snow flurries during the day tomorrow.

Sunday morning will be sunny, but clouds will roll in by afternoon. Highs for the day will be in the upper 30s.

The National Weather Service says Monday could be a mess, with a 40 percent chance of rain or snow in the afternoon and into the evening, and the thermometer stuck in the low 30s.

It’s the same forecast for Tuesday. The first break New Yorkers can expect will be Thursday, when Mother Nature will treat the city to a high of 40 degrees. But don’t get used to it.

AccuWeather’s long-range forecast calls for next weekend to be lousy as well, with a chance of snow and rain zapping the Big Apple.

There’s even a byline for this story, which basically amounts to the weather on the evening news. Who gets this job? All it is is turning a forecast into paragraph format. I love it.

Speaking of the evening news, our favorite weatherman, Channel 7’s Sam Champion, had the best line last night as the snow was coming down: “Shoot that groundhog.” Boo yah!

Did you know that Sam Champion has an indie band named after him? They even outgoogle him. That doesn’t seem right.

More Gates-related opinion, this time from the New York Observer’s Hilton Kramer, who is predictably crabby:

My own view is that the gates are nothing less than an unforgivable defacement of a public treasure, and everyone responsible for promoting it—including our publicity-seeking Mayor—should be held accountable, not only for supporting bad taste but for violating public trust.

What has to be understood about this whole affair is that it’s not only an assault on nature, but also the wanton desecration of a precious work of art. After all, Central Park is the creation of two of the greatest landscape artists in our history—Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—and it’s entitled to the kind of care and protection that civilized societies normally accord to works of art that belong to the community. If some barbarian entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and proceeded to drape orange banners on the paintings and sculptures, we can be sure that the police would be called in to halt such a flagrant violation of a treasured art collection.

With sincere apologies to Joe Queenan (whose [blank] Sucks! series of articles in Spy Magazine were some of the funniest things I’ve ever read and remember), I want to clear up something that I’ve been saving up for a while: Face it, Central Park Sucks.

This is not to say that it’s not a lovely place, a treasured oasis in the middle of a busy city, a stunning achievement of design and reinterpretation of nature, or what-have-you. It’s just that sometimes I question whether it’s really the “big, beautiful canvas” folks like Hilton Kramer constantly say it is.

Let’s review:

It’s certainly overexposed; try finding some solace for contemplative communing with so-called nature there on one of a handful of pleasant spring or summer days. You can’t. Even in New York there are more pleasant natural settings to “get away from it all.”

As a stunning achievement in landscape design, I don’t think it’s a myth that Olmsted and Vaux preferred their design for Prospect Park to the earlier Central Park. (I will gladly revise this if it turns out this isn’t the case; I’ve heard it so often that I believe it’s true.) Sure, you move through the formalism of the park’s southern end towards the untrammeled beauty of the Ramble; big fucking deal — Van Cortlandt Park, for example, is basically the same thing! Plus there are those absurd transverse roads that cut up the “genius design.” A revolution in traffic flow, but not exactly picturesque. And that gaudy Belvedere Castle — come on! A model boat pond — please! Statuary to well-known greats like Giuseppe Mazzini — what exactly does he have to do with Central Park? Nothing! And don’t even get me started on Sir Walter Scott or noted Confederate gynecologist James Marion Sims. Face it, this park was “defaced” long before Christo and Jeanne-Claude got to it.

For all Kramer’s righteous indignance over the “precious work of art” that is Central Park, he is perhaps forgetting the myriad transgressions perpetrated on it over the years. I’ll take fifty years of Gates before another crappy-ass ice skating rink, volleyball court, baseball field or playground — not to mention the yearly commercialization of Summerstage concerts in the park. If Olmsted and Vaux could see it today, I’m sure they wouldn’t take too kindly the encroachment on their “design.” Which is to say, it’s a fucking park, dude — it’s meant to be used! I have to say, I don’t really care whether there are five more places for lawn bowling (think about that violation of “democratic ideals” for a second there). Parks are meant to be inhabited. Even by dog runs! Call it what you want, but it’s far from a painting in the Met.

From stoners lighting up in Sheep Meadow to the used condoms in the Ramble to the countless movie crews restricting access to the cabs speeding down the drive to the hippies playing bad folk music at Strawberry Fields to the parasitic vendors to the crowds, crowds, CROWDS, the park is not all it’s made out to be. Face it, Central Park Sucks!

(Again, apologies to Joe Queenan, but I’m typing quickly here.)

By way of a bonus, here are Excerpts from Queenan’s piece, posted on a newsgroup back in 1993 (I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s basically what I remember):

With one or two exceptions - Coltrane, Miles - jazz is an art form that has always been dominated by fat old men in sunglasses and ridiculous suits playing songs with names like “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and “Epistrophy.” And talk about role models: The most famous jazz musician of them all was a tubby old trumpet player who ended up singing “Hello, Dolly!” with Streisand while wiping his forehead with a soggy hankerchief like some lard-butt umpire at Wrigley Field on Nickel Beer Night. The second-most famous jazz musician was a self-anointed duke who wrote ghastly songs like “Satin Doll.” The third-most-famous jazz musician was an emaciated junkie who used to play with his back to the audience and occasionally sprayed the folks in the front row while spitting into his instrument. The list of deadbeats goes on and on. Stan Getz? Junkie. Chet Baker? Junkie. Charlie Parker? Junkie. Oscar Peterson? Fat, old, boring ivory-tinkler.

I wish, wish, wish someone would reprint these essays somewhere! “Greenmarkets Suck” was another hilarious one.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s dirty secret emerges — The Gates aren’t really “saffron”:

When it comes to art and food, everyone is a critic.

That’s the case with “The Gates,” the public art snaking through 23 miles of Central Park through Sunday. The artists who produced this series of flags, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, say it is the color of saffron. New Yorkers who know their way around a kitchen disagree.

“Saffron produces a golden color, like a taxicab,” said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant and an expert cook who lives in Brooklyn. Like many other cooks, he was surprised that the artists called the fabric saffron. “This color is orange - more like a persimmon than saffron,” he said.

To the cook, saffron is the color of Provençal bouillabaisse, Milanese risotto, and Indian shrikhand.

It is not the color of a crossing guard’s safety vest.

It makes a difference when chefs are charged with devising saffron-related dishes to complement the event:

Not that a color correction would matter much in some New York restaurants, where any promotion in February can seem like a good idea. NYC & Company, a publicly financed organization that promotes the city, has encouraged restaurants to develop special saffron menus in honor of “The Gates.”

But a dish made golden with saffron does not look much like a “Gate.” So at Bolo, for instance, the chef de cuisine, Dan Mihalko, had to add carrots to his saffron sauce to produce the right color.

Bill Yosses, the chef at Josephs, runs his saffron Pavlova under the broiler to add some toasty hues to the meringue. “It’s the real saffron color - it’s yellow orange,” he said.

At Django the chef Cedric Tovar did his best to make the promotion work, though he said he does not understand the relationship between “The Gates” and the spice, or even between public art and his kitchen.

Still, he soldiered on. He put a bouillabaisse with saffron on the menu, then added an appetizer of grilled stuffed squid punched up with a sauce of piquillo peppers, vinegar and olive oil. The sauce, he says, is orange. And saffron-free.

“I guess the color is what they want,” he said. “I haven’t seen ‘The Gates’ myself.”

And with that, I see the true genius behind Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Just when you’re sick to death of reading about their installations, they’re over. Can I say it? I will: Please, Lord, make it stop! (And, God willing, Sunday it should!)

Mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner convened a press conference to outline his ideas for the city’s future only to be met by a counterprotest from a group of ironworkers looking for work, in a manner of speaking:

Ironworkers crashed a news conference of mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner held on the steps of City Hall yesterday, taunting the congressman over his opposition to the planned West Side stadium.

“Tony, Tony!” they shouted over and over. “Stadium yes, Weiner no!”

Weiner scheduled the event to issue a booklet spelling out his campaign of “ideas.” But most of the press questions focused on his opposition to the Bloomberg-backed Manhattan stadium plan.

Weiner wants the stadium to be built in Queens, near Shea Stadium.

Short of having my personal life exposed for all to see by the Post, the second worst thing I can imagine is to be bumrushed by a bunch of pissed off union guys. I live in fear that inflatable rat:

Still, it wouldn’t occur to me in a million years to try to drown them out with an alternative chant, as apparently happened with Representative Weiner:

After his news conference, Weiner tried to speak to the demonstrators, who repeatedly drowned him out with chants of “Build it now!”

He answered with chants of “Jets in Queens, Jets in Queens!” before giving up.

“Jets in Queens.” Hmm, has a ring to it. Not! Dude, they tried that already!

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl weighs in on The Gates:

Those who deplore “The Gates” as ugly aren’t wrong, just poor sports. The work’s charm-free, synthetic orange hue—saffron? no way—is something you would wear only in the woods during deer season, in order to avoid being shot. The nylon fabric is sullen to the touch. The proportions of the arches are graceless, and dogs alone esteem the clunky bases. As for the sometimes heard praise of the work for framing and, in the process, revealing unsuspected lovelinesses of the Park—C’mon, people! You don’t need artificial aids to notice things. “The Gates” does trigger beauty when, as on the aforementioned Sunday afternoon, a low sun backlights the fluttering fabric, which combusts like stained glass in a molten state. This effect lasts all of about two seconds—the time span suggested in the observation of the art historian Kenneth Clark that we can enjoy a purely aesthetic sensation for only as long as we can keenly savor the smell of a fresh-cut orange. (Yes, he said an orange.) “The Gates” succeeds precisely by being, on the whole, a big nothing. Comprehended at a glance, it lets us get right down to being crazy about ourselves, in a bubble of participatory narcissism that it will be pitiable to have missed.

I don’t have a problem with that reading of it!

Administrative Note: Remember “A bubble of participatory narcissism that it will be pitiable to have missed” for future reference!

The Times takes glee in noting that NYC2012 planners kept IOC members on a short leash in Queens:

Since the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission arrived in New York on Sunday night, organizers of the city’s Olympic bid have constantly reminded commissioners and their news media entourage that one of the city’s strongest selling points in trying to land the 2012 Games is its ethnic diversity. That Olympic ideal, they insist, could well catapult the melting pot of New York over its four rival cities also bidding for the Games.

But yesterday, when the news media followed in the footsteps of the tour arranged for commission members, the sights and smells of Queens, the city’s most diverse borough, were a bit hard to detect.

The organizers of the city’s Olympic bid claim that the commission was on a tight schedule. The Times acknowledges that they did get to “set foot” on some part of the borough, though not the Times’ conception of what constitutes typical Queens:

The I.O.C. and its news media entourage managed to set foot on a street for a few moments, after they were bused to Long Island City and let off at the Avalon, a luxury high-rise next to the site where the proposed Olympic Village would be built.

The guests were quickly taken up to a $6,500-a-month duplex with sweeping views of the city and the proposed athletes’ village site, on the East River across from Midtown.

Finally, the obligatory “submitting to sumptuous spreads” paragraphs — part reporting, part confessional (including props, well deserved, to the Waterfront Crabhouse!):

Aware that a good press corps travels on its belly, organizers have made sure that all tours and presentations include free food and drink. And indeed, many of the reporters and photographers seem content to be herded into hermetically sealed tours of New York and to submit to sumptuous spreads with the eagerness of a decathlete chugging Gatorade.

Organizers have also presented a smorgasbord of former Olympians from around the world to testify that the Olympics and New York City are a match made on Mount Olympus.

At lunchtime, the news media contingent was ushered into the Waterfront Crab House in Long Island City, where it dined on filet mignon, wine, pecan pie and coffee, and listened to Bill Bradley, the former senator and Knicks star. Revising an ad slogan for New Jersey, he called New York and the Olympics “perfect together.”

This story in the Times’ City Section might be the best one about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates Project — “Apricot Fabric Plus Gray Panes Turns Squeegees Into Bits of Gold”:

Patrick Shields, a residential window cleaner in Manhattan, was just settling into his annual winter break in late January when the phone began ringing off the hook. At first he couldn’t account for the volume of calls for his services, but then he spotted a pattern: all the customers, many of them anxious, lived on streets bordering Central Park.

It was then that Mr. Shields realized that he was personally reaping the vaunted economic benefits of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s public art project “The Gates.” And Mr. Shields has been hanging out at high-rise apartments ever since, earning unaccustomed profits by wielding his suddenly in-demand squeegee on more than 200 windows along Central Park West, Fifth Avenue and Central Park South.

“This is two grand in my pocket that I never make this time of year,” Mr. Shields said between jobs the other day. “And what’s most interesting to me, in terms of the importance people give ‘The Gates,’ is that in a lot of cases I’m cleaning windows that aren’t that dirty and don’t really need it, but they want to get a good clean shot at this thing.”

Other window washers report a similar surge in business around the park’s periphery.

“We’re probably doing at least 50 windows a day around the park,” said Richard Kulzer, owner of Frank’s Window Cleaning Company, which specializes in Yorkville and the Upper West Side. “Increases in those locations could be a hundred percent over normal. And there’s an increased urgency: the sooner the better.”

See, we told you it’d have an economic impact!

You might be surprised to hear that the Bay Ridge club where the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were filmed finally closed last week. Yes, it still existed!

The Times has a piece in Sunday’s City section about how pieces of the club’s famous floor are being auctioned on Ebay:

In front of the closed dance club at 64th Street and Eighth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a red velvet rope lies in a trash bin, an echo of a legendary place and era.

The velvet rope is a remnant of Spectrum, which is being sold and which shut its doors a week ago. It was here in 1977, at a place then called 2001 Odyssey, that a white-suited John Travolta strutted across the lit-from-below dance floor and into cinematic history in “Saturday Night Fever.”

In the nearly three decades since, even as Asian immigration changed the face of a neighborhood that was once heavily Italian and Norwegian, the dance floor remained a constant, welcoming a diverse new generation of gay clubgoers along with those nostalgic for the movie and the disco era.

Jay Rizzo, who has owned the club since it became Spectrum in 1987, said the place was an especially popular stop for Europeans. “I guess it was on a list somewhere of things to see in New York,” he said. “They would take a cab from Manhattan just to see the dance floor, and of course we wouldn’t charge them.”

The wood-and-plexiglass floor was built specifically for the movie and remained essentially unchanged over the years. “The only things that were different were the light bulbs,” Mr. Rizzo said.

I can’t believe no one took the velvet rope as a souvenir! What exactly is the Museum of the City of New York there for if not for detritus like this?

Pitchers and catchers having reported, this week calls for a cool Clyde Haberman piece on Bob Sheppard, whose “stately, august, classic, silken, dignified, elegant, mellifluous, sonorous, velvety and soothing” voice you should recognize as the PA announcer at Yankee Stadium:

The Voice. Even over the telephone, it is unmistakable.

No one who has ever set so much as a foot inside Yankee Stadium over the last half-century can fail to recognize Bob Sheppard’s voice. It is so infused with authority that Mr. Sheppard could read Eminem lyrics aloud and make them sound like Magna Carta.

Then again, what did you expect when you phoned him - Jackie Mason?

“I speak the same way at Yankee Stadium that I speak in the church,” he said from Jupiter, Fla., where he spends much of the winter. “I speak the same way in the classroom. I speak the same way to you over the phone. I’m kind of limited in what I can do. I’m not good at dialects.”

Here it is, the last week of February, and another baseball season is upon us. Teams have begun spring training with more than the usual antagonisms swirling around them.

Bad enough that players change teams more often than Sean Combs changes his name. Now fans have something far more unsettling to absorb. We’re talking about the disheartening allegations of steroid use that threaten to undermine home run records and other statistics in this most numbers-centric of all major sports.

Through the turmoil, New York baseball fans have at least one touchstone: Bob Sheppard. He is a constant - like the subway, only more dependable.

He has been the public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium since April 17, 1951, when Harry Truman was in the White House and the war du jour was in Korea. The first batter whose name he called out was DiMaggio. That would be Dom DiMaggio of the visiting Boston Red Sox, not his more famous Yankee brother, Joe.

Mr. Sheppard has endured through 11 presidents and 8 New York mayors, not to mention the countless vagaries of the team’s longtime owner, George Steinbrenner, who he says has never criticized him but also “has not been generous” with compliments.

Naturally, you want to know how old Mr. Sheppard is, but he refuses to say. Here’s a clue. One of his boyhood heroes was the great first baseman George Sisler, who hit .407 in 1920 and .420 in 1922.

Why be so sensitive about age? he is asked. Anyone can do the math.

“Well, don’t,” he replies. “Just don’t.”

O.K., no math.

What you really need to know is that the Voice is remarkably undented by time. Sportswriters have stretched themselves sore reaching for adjectives to describe it. Stately, august, classic, silken, dignified, elegant, mellifluous, sonorous, velvety and soothing form but a partial list. All those words still apply, especially in this age of screaming sports announcers who make the old Crazy Eddie pitchman sound sedate.

But why don’t we talk, Mr. Sheppard suggested, about something other than baseball or football, which he also announces for the absurdly named New York Giants of New Jersey. Aside from learning some new names, like Randy Johnson and Carl Pavano, preparing for his 55th season with the Yankees does not exactly involve heavy lifting.

He preferred to reflect on the way New Yorkers mistreat the English language, not a surprising concern for someone who taught speech for decades at St. John’s University and John Adams High School in Queens, his native borough.

TOO many of us, it seems, talk too fast. We hit our G’s way too hard in words like “singer,” even those of us who are not from Lawn Guyland. Public speakers are no thrill, either. For Mr. Sheppard, a Roman Catholic, no one approaches the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. “He spoke the truth,” Mr. Sheppard said. “He spoke it fervently. He spoke it eloquently.”

Do any politicians make the grade?

Franklin D. Roosevelt did - “smooth and eloquent,” Mr. Sheppard said. But “there are not so many people anymore,” he said. “I can’t think of any recent politician, except that young fellow who spoke at the Democratic convention.” He was referring to Barack Obama, the new United States senator from Illinois. “He struck me as someone who is going to be heard from again and again and again.”

And so will Mr. Sheppard, if all goes well.

He is often called on to read Scripture in church. Routinely, he says, people approach him later to ask if he is the guy who announces at Yankee Stadium. “It happens over and over and over again,” he said with a laugh. “Not by sight. I mean, nobody knows what I look like. It’s kind of an anonymous thing.”

Wouldn’t he like to be recognized on sight?

Not really, the Voice said. “Humility is a great grace.”

The City’s Department of Homeless Services is offering $100 to volunteers to serve as quality control decoys for their annual homeless count:

As part of a new quality-control measure from the Department of Homeless Services, some 150 “fake” homeless - graduate students clad in old clothes and blankets - will be sent out to see if the volunteers spot them.

If the volunteers approach the decoys, the fakes, who are making $100 each, will ‘fess up and hand over a sticker to make sure they are not mistakenly counted.

The idea is to test the effectiveness of the count, which has been criticized by some homeless advocates because it partly relies on estimates.

“What happens to this cadre of 150 could be a fairly faithful replica” of the count’s accuracy, said Dr. Kim Hopper, a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute, who is leading the decoy effort.

Some 1,500 volunteers have already signed up and will gather at 10:30 p.m. Monday for a quick training session, then hit the streets at midnight for a few hours.

Not clear if they are offering a bonus for multiple visits.

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge is being put on a diet:

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge has a weight problem.

Over the decades, the 65-year-old suspension bridge has been bulked up to make it more stable. But now engineers have decided that it has grown too beefy.

“We put this bridge on a diet,” said Michael C. Ascher, the president of M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels, an arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Here’s a bridge that’s 65 years old. It got a little heavy around the midsection. Just like with the human anatomy, as you get on in years, lean is better. In this case, instead of putting an extra strain on your heart and other organs, it’s putting a strain on the supporting structure, the skeleton, of the bridge.”

When the work is completed a year from now, the steel and concrete bridge will have shed 6,000 tons, or one-quarter of its total suspended weight. Engineers say the decreased weight will reduce the strain on the bridge’s steel cables, make it more durable and lengthen its life by decades, if not centuries.

If you missed some of the bridge’s backstory, it’s interesting:

Last year, workers completed the removal of steel trusses that were installed on each side of the bridge in 1946, after the notorious collapse of a bridge in Washington State. In June, they will begin replacing the bridge’s concrete deck with a lightweight steel version that is being built in Brazil.

The project to decrease the bridge’s load, which follows years of wind and stress tests on laboratory models, is possible because of advances in aerodynamic design.

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge has long been known for its slim and graceful profile. It was built in less than two years to serve visitors to the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and it opened to traffic on April 29, 1939 - the day before the start of the fair.

Stretching 2,300 feet between its two towers, the span was the fourth longest in the world. At the ribbon-cutting, Robert Moses, the highways and parks czar who oversaw the bridge’s construction, called it “architecturally the finest bridge of them all.”

But a year later, a catastrophe on the West Coast shook that image.

On Nov. 7, 1940, the deck of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisted itself apart and plunged into the water below during a fierce windstorm. No one was killed, but the collapse, captured on film, instantly became one of the most infamous engineering failures in history.

The prevailing theories in bridge design at the time paid little heed to aerodynamics, according to Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and of history at Duke University who has written extensively on bridge design.

“The idea that a bridge roadway or a deck could undulate, could be moved vertically by the wind - that was just not thought to be something to worry about,” he said. “The idea was to make the deck, the roadway of the bridge, as slender as possible. The aesthetic model was driving this, and it was generally thought that these bridges were so big, massive and heavy, built of steel and concrete, that the wind was just not going to move them. And that was wrong.”

Even before the Bronx-Whitestone opened, engineers noticed that its deck would occasionally sway in the wind and shift back and forth, lengthwise, between the two steel towers.

The Bronx-Whitestone was neither as long nor as narrow as the Tacoma Narrows, but the same engineer, Leon S. Moisseiff, had worked on both bridges. The chief engineer of the New York bridge, Othmar H. Ammann, was on a commission that investigated the failure of the Washington bridge.

Mr. Ammann insisted that the Bronx-Whitestone was stable, but its pendulum-like movement alarmed drivers and pedestrians and Mr. Moses ordered it stiffened.

“He felt that the risk of losing motorists and therefore revenue far outweighed what the engineers said and that this perception of instability was unacceptable,” said Darl Rastorfer, the author of “Six Bridges: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann” (Yale University Press, 2000).

In 1940, diagonal stiffening cables were installed on the bridge. In 1946, two steel trusses were erected on the sides of the bridge to stiffen it more. The trusses resulted in the elimination of the pedestrian walkways and the widening of the bridge from four to six lanes of traffic.

Bridge enthusiasts lamented that the installation of the trusses marred the bridge’s aesthetic qualities. “It ruined the view of the skyline of Manhattan,” Professor Petroski said

See also: nycroads.com’s Bronx-Whitestone Bridge Historic Overview

Inner libertarian: activate. Form of: a snarky blog post about a proposed City Council bill to force movie theaters to be truthful about when the main feature will begin:

It’s the latest horror at the movies: endless ads for everything from ladies’ underwear to perfume to soda.

But a new City Council bill aims to set moviegoers free with a different kind of advertising - movie listings that reflect when movies actually begin, not the ads and previews before.

“We can’t outlaw advertising,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), author of the bill. “But at least we can tell the industry that they have to be honest about when their movies start, not their ads.”

. . .

If passed, Brewer’s bill would require theaters to advertise the “actual start time” of any movie, not when ads and previews begin. Any theater that doesn’t comply could face fines of $500 to $1,000 for each infraction.

Not surprisingly, the city’s larger theater chains are giving two thumbs down to the idea, saying moviegoers know to expect “pre-feature content” at any movie.

Shouldn’t the City Council be more worried about the important issues — resolutions opposing war in Iraq, for example?

Council Member Brewer explains herself:

“In the scheme of things, it isn’t life or death,” said Brewer. “But people shouldn’t feel used after going to the movies.”

If the benchmark for passing legislation protecting consumers is “feeling used,” then I can think of many more useful bills — a warning label indicating when Andy Dick will appear, for example. The possibilities are endless.

AAA notes the city’s worst highways: The “very worst” is the ramp from the northbound Major Deegan Expressway to the George Washington Bridge (the Daily News explains: “At the end of a steep spiral ramp where two lanes merge, trucks must cross two busy lanes in a quarter mile to reach the bridge.”); the Gowanus Expressway from the Belt Parkway to the Prospect Expressway; the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Hamilton Ave. to Tillary St.; and the Goethals Bridge, connecting Staten Island and New Jersey.

Sure, these highways were built for, like, Model Ts driving 35 miles an hour. So go slower! Against my better judgement, I’m exercising my Inner Adam Gopnik to say, “Deal with it.”

The latest Law & Order treatment, as reported by the Daily News:

A blood-curdling scream pierced a dark Brooklyn subway tunnel early yesterday when two transit workers found a bloody trash bag packed with an arm and two legs.

It works something like this:

FADE IN:

INT. SUBWAY TUNNEL

We HEAR a BLOOD-CURDLING SCREAM. We SEE two TRANSIT WORKERS uncover a BLOODY TRASH BAG packed with an arm and two legs.

Back to the article:

The transit workers were setting up lights for a cleaning crew when they spotted a bare foot sticking out of the bag. The sight was so sickening that the first worker who saw it started to scream hysterically.

“We didn’t understand what he was saying,” the other worker told The News.

“He was blurting, ‘There’s a leg! There’s a leg!’ At first, I thought someone was under a train.”

“At first when you looked at it, it didn’t look real . . . But then under the bag you could see a trail of blood,” the worker added.

“People can be vicious.”

Peering inside the bag, cops saw an arm and two legs. The legs had been cut off below the hips.

The blue recycling bags were found shoved between the tracks and the tunnel wall, near an emergency exit that leads to the street above.

The bag with the body parts was split on both sides along the seams because of its heavy load. There were no signs that it had been dragged along the trackbed, the worker said.

Cops later found the bloody tools and drill bits a few feet away, near the northbound tracks.

. . .

Joelle Washington, 20, could barely speak about the friend she’s known since kindergarten.

“I just hope they find all of him so he can rest in peace,” she said sadly.

Yuck.

Coffee cups advertising strip clubs:

A Manhattan strip club has turned the humble cardboard cup into a billboard for its topless show girls, giving java drinkers another kind of morning eyeopener.

Cups advertising Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club are being sold out of more than 30 midtown and Wall Street coffee carts, but turning off some customers and vendors.

“I hate these cups,” said Oleg Morosov after his order from a Lexington Ave. vendor arrived in a Hustler Club cup. “I think I’m starting to develop a reputation at work because of these cups.”

When asked about whether children should be subjected to such PG-13 containers, one vendor noted that children shouldn’t drink coffee. “It stunts their growth,” he said.

OK, since the article didn’t feature anyone defending the cups, that actually wasn’t in there — but it should have been!

New York City has filed an application to trademark the phrase “The World’s Second Home.” For real:

Lest there be any doubt, the Bloomberg administration wants to make official what generations of immigrants in New York have long known: the city is the world’s second home.

In application No. 78484751 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the city is seeking to trademark the phrase, “The World’s Second Home.” It wants exclusive rights to use it to promote business, tourism and economic development in the city, and hopes to slap it on everything from mouse pads and money clips to baby bibs and beanbag chairs.

If New York is successful, other cities that might fancy themselves the world’s second home could not legally apply that phrase to any of the 200-odd products and services enumerated in New York’s application. Among them are film and theatrical productions, parades, chair pads, sunglasses, temporary tattoos, postcards, beach sandals, and “electric light switch plates.”

“For all of those things, if the city got its trademark registration, nobody could come out with sunglasses and use the phrase, ‘The world’s second home,’” said William M. Borchard, an intellectual-property lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman in New York. “To do that, they would have to obtain a license from the city.”

The Times further explains how this would work in practice:

Of course, there are plenty of things not on the city’s list. Boston could conceivably license a line of canned beans under the label, “Bean Town - the world’s second home,” without running afoul of New York’s trademark. (”Bean Town” is actually the registered trademark of an Illinois company that sells dried beans.)

New York could eventually try to enforce an American trademark internationally to prevent, say, Paris from laying claim to the same title. In fact, it is New York’s contest with Paris and three other foreign cities to play host to the 2012 Summer Olympics that is driving its quest for this silver medal of geopolitical names. (Presumably, the gold would go to “the world’s home,” but no one has sought that title, according to a search of trademark records.)

The trademark application is one of several the city has filed since September as part of an ambitious plan to secure the rights to catchphrases, abbreviations and logos that it wants to license to makers of consumer products and clothing. Among them: a line drawing of the city’s official seal, which includes a sailor, an Indian and a beaver; the phrase “Made in NY”; and a Taxi and Limousine Commission badge, intended primarily for use on toy cars.

So if New York is the World’s Second Home, are, say, the Hamptons New York’s Second Home? And would that make the Hamptons the World’s Third Home? And as the Times notes, which city is audacious enough to call itself the World’s Home?

The dissemination of Gates-related memorabilia on EBay has begun:

Sometimes a cardboard tube is just a cardboard tube. But sometimes, as a New York teenager discovered this week, a cardboard tube might be an objet d’art worth $1,200 - to the right buyer.

Last Saturday, Dane Kolomatsky, 15, accompanied his mother and a friend of hers to Central Park to view “The Gates,” the public artwork created by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and composed of 7,500 saffron-colored nylon curtains hanging from rectangular frames along the pathways of the park.

Walking by the Loeb Boathouse near 72nd Street, Dane said, he saw a pile of cardboard tubes on the ground. The tubes had served to spool the curtains at the top of the gates. With the curtains unfurled, the tubes were destined to be transported out of the park and recycled.

“I picked out the smallest one, which was seven feet long, and I asked a volunteer if I could have it,” Dane said. “And he said, ‘Yes, but only one.’ ”

It was not until he decided to sell the cardboard tube on eBay, the popular auction Web site, that Mr. Kolomatsky become embroiled in an impassioned debate over New York’s latest artistic extravaganza.

The tube is one of many pieces of Gates detritus to show up on EBay. Other examples include, somewhat ominously, one of the bolts used to hold the gates together.

In the end, the tube owner decided to retain the keepsake.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates Project opened yesterday in Central Park:

So that is what 1.089 million yards of orange-yellow fabric looks like, floating and fluttering and flapping in Central Park.

The giant $21 million art project “The Gates,” which had already filled the park’s 23 miles of pathways with thousands of saffron-colored portals, blossomed yesterday at 8:31 a.m., just as the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, had planned.

They watched as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg raised a long metal pole to release fabric from the top of a gate in the Sheep Meadow. Also watching was a crowd that chanted a countdown like the one heard each New Year’s Eve in Times Square - “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”- before the mayor unfurled the fabric on the first gate.

The Times was on hand to gauge the crowd’s impressions:

By midmorning, the park’s circulatory system had taken on the bright color of veins twisting and twirling against the gray-and-brown backdrop of midwinter. The pleated nylon fabric pulsed and swayed at the whim of a 12-mile-an-hour wind - not strong enough to make it snap like a spinnaker on an America’s Cup challenger. The color was almost as fiery and fierce as the sun that had risen a couple of hours earlier.

“Look at the light,” Christo said. “Look, look.”

In the crowd, people tried to do exactly that. People who had tried to imagine what the completed project would look like finally had a glimpse.

Some described them as too-short window shades dangling in the breeze. Some mentioned squarish out-of-season butterflies. Some were intrigued by the play of light on the fabric: as the peekaboo sun came and went, the nylon had a touchable texture one minute and a one-dimensional look the next. Some echoed what Christo and Jeanne-Claude had said about a river of bright color against twigs and leafless branches. Some talked about exhilaration and exuberance. Some were more literal.

“A pleated skirt,” said Kathleen Catapano of Brooklyn. She looked again, and another idea came to mind: “I think it looks like Jeanne-Claude’s hair.”

We were there so Jed Perl didn’t have to be, and speaking of Jed, The Times’ Michael Kimmelman weighs in, giving a more positive appraisal after having actually seen the Gates:

Thousands of swaths of pleated nylon were unfurled to bob and billow in the breeze. In the winter light, the bright fabric seemed to warm the fields, flickering like a flame against the barren trees. Even at first blush, it was clear that “The Gates” is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.

On a partly sunny, chilly morning, with helicopters buzzing overhead and mobs of well-wishers on hand, an army of paid helpers gradually released the panels of colored fabric from atop the 16-foot-tall gates, all 7,500 of them. The shifting light couldn’t have been better to show off the effects of the cloth. Sometimes the fabric looked deep orange; at other times it was shiny, like gold leaf, or silvery or almost tan. In the breeze, the skirted gates also appeared to shimmy like dancers in a conga line, the cloth buckling and swaying.

. . .

I hadn’t been quite sure when I first saw the project going up last week. From outside the park, the gates looked like endless rows of inert orange dominoes overwhelming Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece.

But as the artists have insisted, the gates aren’t made to be seen from above or from outside. I stopped in at a friend’s office high above Central Park South yesterday and ogled the panorama, which was lovely. But it was beside the point. It’s the difference between sitting in a skybox at Giants Stadium and playing the game on the field. The gates need to be - they are conceived to be - experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye.

There are no bad locales for seeing them. But there are some spots at which the work looks best: around the Heckscher ball fields, where the gates are dense and lines of them swarm in many directions at once; at the base of Strawberry Fields, where two parallel rows march in tight syncopation; at Harlem Meer, where they cluster up to the shore and then clamber, helter-skelter, up the rocks. Also at Great Hill, near West 106th Street, where they encircle the crescent field, then descend a flight of steep steps.

And at North Meadow, a wide-open vista, where the gates wander off toward the horizon, separating earth and sky with an undulating saffron band.

And in the end, Kimmelman helps express what Christo and Jeanne-Claude either didn’t want to or couldn’t:

Some purists will complain that the art spoils a sanctuary, that the park is perfect as it is, which it is. But the work, I think, pays gracious homage to Olmsted’s and Vaux’s abiding pastoral vision: like immense Magic Marker lines, the gates highlight the ingenious and whimsical curves, dips and loops that Olmsted and Vaux devised as antidotes to the rigid grid plan of the surrounding city streets and, by extension, to the general hardships of urban life.

The gates, themselves a cure for psychic hardship, remind us how much those paths vary, in width, and height, like the crowds of people who walk along them. More than that, being so sensitive to nature, they make us more sensitive to its effects.

We didn’t need the gates to make us sensitive, obviously. Art is never necessary. It is merely indispensable.

At its best, it leads us toward places we might not have thought to visit. Victor Hugo once said, “There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening.” This also applies to gates, which beckon people to discover what is beyond them.

With their endless self-promotion, and followers trailing them like Deadheads from one global gig to another, it’s no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made a few skeptics of people who often have not seen their art at first hand. New Yorkers are a notoriously tough crowd. But I was struck by what I overheard a stranger say. She was a doubter won over yesterday. “It will be fascinating when they’re gone,” she mused.

It took me a second to realize what she meant: that the gates, by ravishing the eye, have already impressed an image of the park on the memories of everyone who has seen them. And like all vivid memories, that image can take a place in the imagination, like a smell or some notes of music or a breeze, waiting to be rekindled.

Once upon a time there were “The Gates.” The time is now.

I’d like to go back and see some of the spots Kimmelman suggested — parts of the project look great, especially from the vantage point of one of the park’s rock outcroppings. And the bright orange (sorry, saffron) looks stunning against a clear blue sky. When there’s a wind, as there was yesterday, the effect of the fabric twisting in the wind is beautiful, but I have to agree with one of the people the Times quoted that when they hang there they sort of look like big drapes. In all, I liked it, though I can see what curmudgeons dislike about the whole enterprise.

One small quibble: the path we took — from 59th and Fifth to Belvedere Castle via the Mall and the Ramble — was, if memory serves, the way Olmsted and Vaux intended the parkgoer to move through, back through nature, as it were. I think Christo and Jeanne-Claude could have done a little more with that idea, though like I said, parts of the project are stunning as they are.

The Post’s coverage highlights a near calamity (”Adding a bit of chaos to the process, as the fabric was unfurled, the cardboard tube it was wrapped around crashed to the ground, sending spectators running and causing a few minor injuries. Bloomberg got bonked on the head by a falling tube. He wasn’t hurt, but elsewhere a man had his glasses shattered and a woman suffered a bloody nose.”) and also features another one of those crabby elderly people — do they actually exist? — who object to everything:

Not everyone was taken by the project’s siren song.

“They deface the park. Why gild the lily? This is the most beautiful park in the entire world,” one elderly man screamed at a woman as she described how much she liked the work.

“You know, art is supposed to provoke controversy, so I’d say that it worked,” the woman, Barbara Peabody, shot back, sending the man storming off.

See also: Daily News coverage; Newsday coverage.

Jed Perl’s Worst Nightmare — thousands of pedestrian art consumers “experiencing” the Gates — is happening as I type this.

At the press conference with the mayor yesterday, Christo came close — this close — to explaining his intentions behind the project:

Asked often yesterday to explain the meaning of the project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude emphasized that its meaning would have to be found by those who walked through the 7,500 gates, spread over 23 miles of walkways.

“It has no purpose,” Jeanne-Claude said. “It is not a symbol. It is not a message. It is only a work of art.”

But Christo explained that it related in some ways to the unrealized plans of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park’s designers, to place iron gates at many of the entrances to the park. He added that the fabric panels, which will blow and curve in the wind, are also meant to remind viewers of the park’s serpentine paths and the curves of the empty branches of the trees above them.

After answering several questions, however, Christo became clearly frustrated by trying to explain his work and emphatically urged experience over rational inquiry. “This project is not involved with talk,” he said. “It is real physical space. You need to spend time walking in the cold air - sunny day, rainy day, even snow. It is not necessary to talk.”

Enough talk! Time to go see the things!

The New Republic’s Jed Perl sounds like that cranky 81-year-old the Post interviewed the other day:

If Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not exist, somebody would have to invent them. The husband-and-wife team whose latest project, “The Gates,” opens in New York’s Central Park on Saturday, are the hardworking, irrepressible promoters of a series of avant-garde-meets-pop-culture happenings that sweep people right off their feet. This fusion phenomenon, with its mix of modernist obscurantism and feel-good communalism, is bohemianism for the masses. There isn’t much of anything left once you’ve stripped these fun-with-fabric extravaganzas of all their logistical complexities. But the sheer bravado of Christo and Jeanne-Claude–who have wrapped buildings and coastlines–can pass for visionary power right now, when so many people are unclear as to where cultural experiences end and life-style choices begin. The acres of saffron cloth that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are unfurling across Central Park are a fashion statement, nothing more. It’s public art for the cocooning generation. It’s aestheticism lite.

Lord, with all that is pretentious in this world we need not gratuitously kiss artist ass, but I do think there’s a little more to the Gates than Perl lets on — fawning crowds and sycophantic volunteers aside. At least I think so! But lest I be equivocal, I should really check in with Herbert Muschamp first — he’s not dead, is he? (Joking! Joking!)

At any rate, Perl questions the Wrapping Wonders’ public art cred:

What fascinates people about Christo and Jeanne-Claude is not only the sensational scale on which they work. It’s also the way that they mix private enterprise and public spiritedness. By now everybody knows that this dynamic duo accepts no public funds. They’re dreamers with entrepreneurial gumption. Speaking to a group of volunteers the other day, Jeanne-Claude told them what to say when people asked about the purpose of “The Gates.” “It’s for nothing,” she explained, as if she were some prophetess of art-for-art’s-sake. “It’s only a work of art. Nothing more.” Well, that sounds very nice. Except that New York City would not be hosting “The Gates” if the Mayor didn’t think it would be a boon to tourism. And the people who are coming from near and far to get in on the action are precisely looking for something more than a work of art–they’re looking for a community, a spectacle, a happening. Of course that desire to experience art with others goes back very far. It’s true that the magic of a masterwork such as Bernini’s Four Rivers fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome has everything to do with our hankering for community, for spectacle. But with Christo and Jeanne-Claude the experience has no core, no essence. All we get is some fabric flapping in the wind. These artists tap into the yen for art. And the yen seems to be enough.

Got that? It wouldn’t be happening if New York didn’t want more tourism. Well no shit, dude. And I’ll clue you in to one more bit of crass commercialism: it wouldn’t be happening if Christo and Jeanne-Claude didn’t also donate a buttload of money to the Central Park Conservancy. But that’s obviously beside the point — from an aesthetic point of view at least.

You may have noticed where he’s going with it. It’s not New York City’s fault — they just want the revenue. It’s not Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fault — they just want to promote themselves. If I’m reading him correctly, it’s the public’s fault, for mindlessly flocking to such frippery. Read on — and for fun, substitute “Phish” or “The Grateful Dead” in the appropriate places:

The people who wander through Central Park taking in “The Gates” are going to have an experience, no question about it. They’re going to be in the midst of one of the world’s most beautiful urban spaces. They’re going to find themselves easily striking up conversations with other visitors, which can be fun. They’re going to enjoy the orange fabric billowing in the breeze, and the patterns of bare trees, and the thrilling sense of the booming city all around. And the more that visitors experience all of this, the more that everybody is going to become convinced that what they’re experiencing is great. For Christo and Jeanne-Claude this sort of communal experience may double as an art-for-art’s-sake experience. But just because you’re being bombarded by sensations doesn’t mean that you’re in the presence of major art–or even of mediocre art. When all feelings are regarded as aesthetic experiences, art is at risk. What Christo and Jeanne-Claude have brought to New York is their own brand of late-modern philistinism.

Like I said, bah freakin’ humbug!

There is an out here, of course: Perl could admit that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s DIY aesthetic (see Fugazi, for example) doesn’t jive with the art world, where anyone who is anyone is represented by a gallery; Christo and Jeanne-Claude represent themselves. (Keep that in mind when you read critics in the next couple of days.)

Look, it’s possible this is going to suck — and I don’t care one iota if it does — but isn’t it possible to at least dig a little deeper than this? I mean, they’re starting to sound like the National Review! (Ooh . . . low blow!)

Big thanks to Ryan at The Side of the Slant for passing this along . . .

The Times reports that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project has spurred a gaggle of cocktail parties in the apartments overlooking the park:

“Everybody I know who lives around the park is doing parties for ‘The Gates,’ said Annaliese Soros, who is planning two parties in her apartment on Central Park West. “The Christo events are happenings, and they attract a lot of enthusiasm. They attract a lot of people. They do something very special and very different. Berlin had five million tourists when he draped the Reichstag. We won’t have that many here.”

She meant in the city, not in her apartment. But some party-givers say the crowd they are expecting is bigger than they had originally planned. The guest list grew as friends called, and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends.

. . .

Donna Rosen, who lives on the 43rd floor of a building a couple of blocks south of Mrs. Soros’s, recalled her conversations with her caterer, Gretchen Aquanita, as they planned an open house in Mrs. Rosen’s apartment. “I said, ‘I think 75,’ ” Mrs. Rosen said. “Then I called again, ‘I think we might be over 100.’ Then I called, ‘200.’ She said, ‘Ahhgggh.’ ”

As the gates were being set in place beneath Mrs. Rosen’s floor-to-ceiling windows on Wednesday, the count was up to 240, and she was talking about Ms. Aquanita’s plans for a menu to match the orange color of the fabric-covered gates on the park’s pedestrian paths.

“She said, ‘Shall we use saffron?’ ” Mrs. Rosen recalled. “I said, ‘Of course.’ ” Ms. Aquanita began planning shrimp and saffron salad.

Meanwhile, Art Historians took note of what was happening:

For some, just looking out the window was not enough to make sure they had a clear view. “I walked over to the park to make sure that I could see the two windows of my apartment,” said Rosamond Ivey, a trustee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who is giving a “Gates” cocktail party in her apartment on East 79th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue late next week.

Her guests will have drinks at her apartment after inspecting “The Gates” on a walk through the park. Then they will go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for dinner, where David Moos, the curator of contemporary art at the Ontario museum, will be joined by Jonathan Feinberg, an art historian who wrote a monograph on “The Gates.”

Mr. Moos, whose museum has a Christo exhibition on display, said he is looking forward to seeing “The Gates” from ground level and from Ms. Ivey’s apartment.

“If you think of Central Park as the great democratic American space, Jeffersonian, Whitmanic, in the heart of the metropolis, it is interesting to contemplate who has access to the aerial view,” he said. “It puts into relief this political dimension.”

Whitmania aside, isn’t the point of the article “contemplating who has access to the aerial view?” Are art historians that dumb, or are writers just that obvious?

Speaking of great democratic spaces, if anyone still believes that Central Park was intended to be one, this is basically a perfect explanation why this is not the case. Though I suppose contintuing to hold out that illusion is attractive — in a purely Whitmanic way, of course.

Leave it to Adam Gopnik to show how the new, larger, easier-to-read street signs being installed around town are threatening New York’s aesthetic existence:

New Yorkers returning home after the Republican Convention last summer were startled and alarmed by an inexplicable new sight: oversized street signs hanging above busy intersections all over town. It has been five months now, and regrettably, unlike the Republicans, the new signs apparently are not going to go back where they came from.

The signs, if you have somehow missed them, are long and green with big white letters, like a “thru traffic” sign on the New Jersey Turnpike, and they loom ominously out over the intersections they superintend, suspended from the arms of traffic-light poles. They name the street that runs beneath them (and therefore, of course, announce to drivers the street they may want to turn onto), and they do this loudly and with unfortunate abbreviations. Over the intersection of Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, for instance, there is now a long green sign proclaiming “Park Av,” with no period. A couple of blocks east, it gets worse: the green sign rubbernecks its way out into the middle of the street and announces “3Av.” This keeps up (2Av, 1Av) until 86St runs, at last, into East End Av.

The worst thing about reading Adam Gopnik is that it sure doesn’t sound like he’s kidding:

The new signs put you immediately in mind of those nightmarish car trips in Los Angeles, where you begin somewhere and, forty-five minutes later, you are somewhere else, and all the while you have been looking for a big sign that reads “Pico.” Worse than merely unfamiliar, though, the signs are infuriating—first, because they are there for the convenience of cars, and thus violate the first Law of Civilization, which states that nothing must ever be done for the convenience of cars (the mark of a city worth living in is that there are never enough places to park); and, second, because they eclipse, as décor, the jaunty, jazz-era syncopation of the classic New York street-corner sign pair, each sign gesturing toward its own street, but with the two set at slightly different levels, so that they have a happy, semaphoric panache. (The two smaller signs are still there, but they are now drowned out by the highway signage, two jazz piccolos trying to be heard above an electrified kazoo.)

Let it be said that Iris Weinshall, the city’s Commissioner of Transportation, speaks up eloquently and staunchly for the new signs: “They are there for all the multiple users in the city—for motorists, for pedestrians, for people who ride on buses. Many people were finding it harder and harder to read those little old signs we have up. For those evil motorists some people don’t like—now, at least, they have time to make decisions.” She went on, “I like the way the signs look, but it’s a safety issue first of all. The more information you give people, the less likely they are to make silly choices.”

But how many silly (i.e., dangerous) choices were actually encouraged by the old signs? No one has ever bombed along Eighty-sixth Street in blind despair, unable to find Madison Avenue. The new signs signal a choice that is not so much silly as dispiriting. They do more than contribute to the ongoing homogenization, the Americanization, of New York. They imply that the homogenization has already taken place. The reason these kinds of signs are necessary at the intersections of Los Angeles boulevards is that all the avenues and streets there look more or less alike. In New York, each avenue should be, and is, instantly recognizable. Park Avenue looks like Park Avenue; Madison Avenue looks like Madison; Broadway looks like nothing on earth but Broadway. You see the street, and you make the turn. New York is not a hard place to get around in. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t deserve to be here.

Look, are the new signs pretty? No. But as someone who values traffic safety even at the risk of disturbing a “happy, semaphoric panache,” I have to say (with all due respect to a very, very talented writer), “Please, for the love of God, shut the fuck up, you pretentious hack.”

The Daily News tackles the age-old question whether florists can match bodedgas in quality of flowers. The answer may surprise you! “The price of love: Florists’ roses go nose-to-nose vs. bodega bargains”:

Over the next few days, thousands of New York men will be faced with a thorny choice: florist or bodega.

As they head home to their honey on Valentine’s Day, they could find a nice flower shop and pick up a dozen long-stemmed roses for about $50.

But many of those men will be tempted to just drop by the corner grocery and buy a bouquet of the red blossoms for a third or less of that price.

After all, a rose is a rose is a rose, right? And it’s not like the love of their life will be able to tell the difference. Right?

Not so fast, Romeo.

An informal survey by the Daily News found that with a glance and sniff, four out of six women can distinguish the cher from the cheap.

The gung-ho team of volunteers is busy raising the gates in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s big project in Central Park. The Times has a big piece on the process today:

At 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, as the sun was beginning to rise over Central Park, the Loeb Boathouse was buzzing. The artist Christo stood outside, admiring the way the soft morning light bathed the orange gates that teams of workers had put into place on Monday.

It was Day Two of installing his vast $20 million public art project, created with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and there was a sense that there was no time to lose. So far, 261 16-foot-tall gates had sprouted around the park. By tomorrow evening, 7,500 will have to be in place along the park’s pedestrian walkways from 59th Street to 110th Street, in time for the saffron-colored fabric that adorns the gates to be unfurled around 8:30 on Saturday morning.

An image of the workers taken today:

The Times describes the volunteers:

While each team seemed diverse in age and profession, from college students to retired teachers and doctors, all had a common bond: a resolve to be a part of the city’s biggest public-art happening ever.

By 7:30 a.m., after a pep talk from Vince Davenport, the project’s chief engineer and construction director, and from Capt. Andrew Capul, commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct, everyone headed off to their assigned areas.

Although Mr. Douaihy called the 261 gates installed on Monday a “respectable” figure, he said that 400 to 500 more would have to go up Tuesday if the effort was to be completed by Friday.

Cruising around the park in a golf cart, he consulted with Guy Efrat, one of the area’s so-called “zone supervisors.” (Each area is divided into zones, and each zone into teams.) Mr. Efrat, who also works in movie production, was overseeing three teams in Mr. Douaihy’s area.

Like mutual strangers in a reality television show, each team felt somewhat randomly thrown together. But often, the common strand was art: Area One, Section 10, for instance, was made up of a performance artist, an advertising art director, a retired doctor/Yale University professor, a sculptor/gilder, an architect, an architectural draftsman, a freelance stagehand and a recent college graduate who is on his way to become an intern at the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary-art organization in Marfa, Tex.

“I’ve never seen so many artsy people in my life,” said Huascar Pimentel, the stagehand, who is one of the professional workers that was assigned to the team. “These guys are great - they don’t mind getting their hands dirty.”

Nor did the men mind taking directions from a woman, although some of them joked about it. (”You don’t see this much cooperation in the workplace,” said Robert Steigelman, the advertising art director.) Catherine Courter, the sculptor and gilder, had been named the team’s captain by the organizers. Michael Bianco, the recent graduate, and Arvin Garay-Cruz, the architect, had been asked to be the “levelers,” the team members who made sure that the steel plates anchoring the poles in heavy bases were installed correctly.

Each worker had attended a four-hour training session last week where the professionals took notes on those who demonstrated leadership ability (potential team captains) or mechanical ability (levelers).

It took only about three minutes for the workers to actually hoist a gate into place. The hard part was using the right size horizontal poles (which depended on the width of walkways) and wielding nuts, bolts and wrenches to attach parts like the orange boxlike sleeves that conceal the metal plates. And some spots were more difficult than others. On heavily trafficked paths, installers often had to stop working to let pedestrians pass. Hilly or narrow paths were harder to work on.

And then there was the saccharine music emanating nonstop from the ice rink. And the remarks of passersby. “I can’t work it out - it horrifies me that this is costing $20 million, I don’t care who’s paying for it,” a man carrying a briefcase said as he hurried past the workers of Area One, Section 10, on West 59th Street behind the Wollman Skating Rink.

Still, most people who stopped to chat had positive reactions. “I’m not sure about the color, but I’m a fan,” Douglas F. Eaton, a United States District Court judge, said after his daily round of skating.

On Monday the team members installed only 18 gates. But by 10:15 on Tuesday morning they were already putting up the 11th of the day. The key was establishing a rhythm: one person repeatedly readied the equipment for the levelers, and the levelers would begin their task as others trundled the gates over to their assigned positions.

“This is my cheap and cheerful vacation,” Robert Condon, the architectural draftsman, said, holding a pole in position. By noon the team headed back to the boathouse for lunch, leaving Mr. Pimentel behind to watch the equipment. (That job rotates among teammates each day.)

“Can you believe it, this was conceived the year I was born?” Mr. Cruz, 26, said as the group ambled toward the boathouse. (Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been working on “The Gates” since 1979.)

“If you look at one gate, it’s ugly, it looks like a guillotine,” he mused. “It’s the multiplicity of them that makes it a total artwork.”

“The more go up, the cooler it looks,” Ms. Courter agreed over lunch in the packed boathouse. Team members sat together, chatting happily while keeping a wary ear open to find out how many gates the other teams had installed.

See also: Preparations for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates Project: Raising the Gates (Big Map page); “Barbarians (Well, Mostly Art Lovers) at the Gates” (NY Times, February 9, 2005)

What starts out as a typical Post kind of story — two Brooklynites arrested for having sex in public, motorcyclists caught doing it with their helmets on, no less! — takes a suspiciously Curb-Your-Enthusiamistic turn later in the report when the perp’s father blames it all on 9/11 (!) and the death of his mother:

A pair of motorcyclists were caught with their pants down — but their helmets still on — along a quiet Brooklyn street.

Robert Wallendorf, 45, and his fiancée Demetra Decolvenaere, 46, were spotted by a cop having sex in the median of a Shore Parkway service road, police said.

They were charged with public lewdness and nudity for the al fresco affair on Monday, near Bay 52nd Street in Gravesend.

Wallendorf was also hit with a single count of drunken driving, to which he pleaded guilty.

According to police sources, shortly after 1 a.m. Monday, Wallendorf and Decolvenaere had parked their motorcycle on the shoulder of Shore Parkway, walked across the road, and began having sex.

Officer Judy Emiliano, on routine patrol, came upon the 1981 Honda motorcycle.

She then saw Wallendorf and Decolvenaere in the median “with their buttocks exposed and their helmets still on, having sex,” said a police source.

The source said the suspects claimed they are engaged to be married. Concluding that the sex was consensual, Emiliano called for backup. Officer Diane McNamara arrived, and arrested them for public sex.

McNamara also smelled alcohol on Wallendorf’s breath, prompting the addi tional drunken-driving charge. He claimed that he was sober when he drove to the median make-out spot, but had “a few beers” once there, the source said.

Wallendorf’s father, Ted, who lives with his son on Marine Parkway, said his son has been drinking excessively since the death of his mother last week.

He added that his son, who works for the Postal Service, helped clean up Ground Zero after 9/11.

“He saw an arm and a leg there,” the father said. “That really got him drinking, but not like now. After his mother died, he got bad.”

“He got the motorcycle to forget his problems, but I don’t like it,” he said.

The man ended up paying a fine, while the public sex charges against the two were later dropped.

And why is it that it always seems to be people in their 40s who are charged with grody public sex acts? The younger and more beautiful are never charged!

The nightmare scenario for the Wedding Industrial Complex is a culture that avoids getting married during an entire year because of its bad luck:

With just hours to go before the Lunar New Year, dozens of Asian New Yorkers raced to the altar yesterday to head off a marriage potentially jinxed by bad fortune.

“Next year is bad luck,” explained Wilson Chau of Flushing, whose son Jason wed Camille Lee at the Municipal Building yesterday afternoon. “The Chinese don’t like next year,” he said, referring to the new year that began today.

This year in the Chinese 12-year calendar cycle is considered a less than auspicious one for nuptials because there’s no first day of spring, said William Dao, museum associate at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, which is in Chinatown.

Known as Lap Chun, the first day of Chinese spring fell on Feb. 4, which means last year, the Year of the Monkey, saw two first days of spring. This year - the Year of the Rooster - has none.

This so-called lunar leap year happens about once every three years and is considered a bad time for weddings, Dao said.

Brides are more likely to be widowed, for instance, and couples may not be as successful as those who time their weddings more carefully.

“It stems from tradition,” Dao said.

The last few weeks have brought a flood of Asian New Yorkers getting quickie marriages to please their traditional - and more superstitious - parents back in their homelands.

According to City Clerk Victor Robles, 1,947 Asian couples applied for marriage licenses between Jan. 1 and Monday. That’s a 552 increase over the same period last year.

Among the couples who descended on the Manhattan city clerk’s office to beat the bad-luck clock were Noviyana Bong and Yauman Kirana, both 22, who are ethnic Chinese from Indonesia and live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

On Sunday, both of their parents called them to demand they get married before today - or face waiting another year to exchange vows.

“I just follow my parents,” Bong said.

Or, Life (Seems to) Imitate Curb Your Enthusiasm:

A former Brooklyn city councilman is accusing a political rival - controversial state Sen. Kevin Parker - of using official stationery to taunt him with a series of bizarre birthday greetings, months after his birthday.

“This is pure harassment and he shouldn’t be using government resources to do it, and I want it to stop,” said Noach Dear, who lost a close primary to Parker in September.

Dear, whose birthday is in November, said three such letters have arrived at his E. Seventh St. home - including one that wished him “a great lifetime.” He is demanding a Legislative Ethics Committee probe.

Parker, 37, who was arrested in Brooklyn last month for allegedly punching a city parking agent in the face after getting a $55 ticket, blamed a computer glitch.

“We often send seniors birthday cards because it’s a big thing to be a senior,” said Parker. “But unless he is coded in the Board of Elections database as someone over 65, he shouldn’t be getting anything from me.”

Dear, who is 51, doesn’t believe the mailings were a mistake.

“What he is doing now is really outrageous,” fumed Dear. “You’d think he’d want to protect the public’s money, but he spends his time wasting money with this sick joke.”

The cards, personally signed by Parker to his political enemy, were inscribed: “Heartfelt best wishes on this special day. … Here’s to a great day, a great week, a great year, a great lifetime!”

Parker raised eyebrows last spring when he awarded attendees at a political fund-raiser with a swag bag containing flavored condoms and lubricants.

The Daily News dubbed him “Revvin’ Kevin” last year when the paper reported Parker racked up three speeding tickets, had his driver’s license suspended and had two highway smashups in recent years.

Workers have begun putting up the orange support beams for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park.

Jeanne-Claude explains the project to a group of children:

“Know why we’re doing this?” Jeanne-Claude asked children yesterday after unexpectedly getting out of a car on East Drive near 90th St.

“They are a work of art, and a work of art is for nothing,” she said. “Only a work of art, for joy and beauty.”

Unfortunately, the Daily News omitted the children’s responses.

Meanwhile, the Post, doing the Postian thing, quotes an 81-year-old retiree doing the 81-year-old retiree thing:

Park-goers seemed excited yesterday as they watched the much-hyped project take form.

“I think it’s good that they are challenging people to re-envision their conception of a place they know so well,” said Chris Martin, 27, a Brooklyn poet.

Others weren’t sold.

“The park is for everyone, not for one person to gum up with their whimsical, individualist fancies,” said Louis Thorn, 81, a Manhattan retiree.

Bah humbug!