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.

Gates Update: Raising the Gates

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)

Gates Update

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!

Another Mystery Solved!

From time to time you may have asked yourself, “How does one raise the capital to open a store below 14th Street devoted to rice pudding?” I know I have!

But now we know the answer to another one of New York’s great mysteries: you don’t — instead, you open a store devoted to rice pudding in order to launder gambling profits:

A multimillion-dollar sports gambling ring – allegedly masterminded by a wealthy “rice pudding entrepreneur” – was sacked yesterday when authorities raided the operation just days before Super Bowl Sunday.

Taking individual bets of more than $10,000 on football and baseball games, the high-stakes ring raked in about $21 million a year, said Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota.

The lucrative operation was headed by Peter Moceo, 45, who lives in the luxurious Trump Tower and owns a chic eatery in NoLIta, prosecutors said.

Investigators seized $25,000 in cash at Moceo’s Spring St. pudding shop, Rice to Riches. But Spota said it wasn’t the rice that brought Moceo his riches.

“We have evidence that he used [gambling] proceeds to start up and actually run Rice to Riches,” Spota said.

The Post (which didn’t even have to embellish its self-evident headline, “Rice to Riches”) adds some details, including this great quote:

Residents living near Moceo’s Little Italy pudding shop said they thought there was something shady about the store, which opened in April 2003.

“Who the heck is going to get rich off rice pudding?” asked Ozbbel Baez, a local carpenter.

Boom! Another mystery solved, which again solidifies our theory that the only people able to succeed in New York are, in fact, just doing something illegal.

Bonus Points: “This Store Sells Rice Pudding. Nothing Else.” article (New York Times, April 2, 2003)

Jeff Koons’ Birthday Party

We might have new shorthand for “kooky excess,” now defined as Jeff Koons’ 50th Birthday, as reported by Talk of the Town:

And then the garage doors opened, and in trooped the marching band of Burlington City High School, in Burlington, New Jersey, wearing navy-blue uniforms and feathered shakos and producing on their instruments a deafening version of “Happy Birthday.” They were followed, a few minutes later, by a pair of white ponies pulling a cart with a three-tiered white cake, out of which popped a girl in a skimpy red bathing suit. [Deitch Projects gallery owner Jeffrey] Deitch had tried to get Jeff’s friend Pamela Anderson for the cake duty, but she had to be at the Sundance Film Festival.