The Economic Engine of Central Park West

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.