The Gates As Massive Trickle-Down Economic Engine

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!