miss representation

So people really like real estate on Central Park. This brilliant insight is courtesy the golden pen of Paul Goldberger, a man who was considered (by Michael Sorkin at least) to be an over-the-hill hack nearly 20 years ago. Things clearly haven’t improved. Everyone — okay, Goldberger and Felix Salmon, a man from whom you will have to pull his CDO’s from his cold, dead fingers — is gaga over the numbers and success of 15 Central Park West. I think it has a fancier name. No matter. You can’t buy an apartment there, and it’s not even done. Whoa! (say that in your best Al Pacino voice). Yeah, apartments facing the park sell well.

Not only that, but they are “instant classics”. The mysterious prewar formula has been unearthed by the imagineers at Bob Stern’s office. I can imagine some dusky eve, fog spilling through the candle-lit offices as a hooded figure marched a book with vaguely demonic figures on the cover up to Bob’s desk, planted it with a thud and opened to a page that revealed… an entrance gallery with an eleven foot ceiling. Whoa! (you know what to do).

I never finished architecture school. So maybe I missed the crucial studio, “Designing apartments with 11’0″ ceilings” and was consequently barred from the star chamber where they hid that book (have you ever seen the News Radio episode where Jimmy James reveals the Secret to Business? I digress. Whoa!). Paul hasn’t either, and has to resort to invoking the names of a couple architects you, I and just about anyone who didn’t furtively sneak a look at the index of 740 Park to see if they were included haven’t heard of. Because they were mediocre hacks in service of a generation of arrivistes that have aged enough to aquire the gilt of institution. And thus their dwellings, at the time attempting to expropriate the grandeur of, say, Kesington, are now being photocopied for the latest generation of people who need the scrim of Anglophile identity to buttress their mania that amassing seven figure fortunes isn’t an adequate accomplishment in a meaningless world, nor apparently a mandate to help the less privileged.

Apparently in the intervening sixty years architects forgot how to design. It’s an old canard, and if you perambulate Manhattan, you would have plenty of evidence to this fact, or at least the continuation of a myth perpetuated by misguided cranks (hello!) and a gullible and uncritical press, namely that architects have much to do at all with the quality of plans in apartments in this city. Sure, some GSD student spent a bunch of time picking this light fixture over that, or argued at length with the sales agents about whether or not luxury could be adequately communicated by Viking, or perhaps the more esoteric Wolf was called for, but otherwise, the failure of new housing to evoke the grandeur of a 30-foot long sitting room isn’t really about limestone sheathing or how big the windows are: it’s about whether or not your sitting room is 30 fucking feet long. And it isn’t.

Maybe that knowledge is lost in the sands of time (except for that paragraph, right there, above), or in that mysterious book Bob won’t lend to anyone, or, hey maybe it’s that people who seek outsize returns in property development are short-sighted, greedy and completely oblivious to the idea they exist in both a community and culture and have a duty to sustain it, rather than just skim the rewards off the top. No, it can’t be that. Otherwise we would be awash in town filled with buildings designed by Costas Kondylis and Richard Scarano (you know, I long for the days of the mid-90′s when you had to be a total development wonk to even know who Kondylis was). Of course, a 30-foot living room isn’t necessarily giving back to the community but I think you can see where I’m going here.

Felix brings up the A.A. Gill article from Vanity Fair about the successes and failures of floor-to-ceiling glass and what kind of role that plays in the perception of a ‘comfy’ room. I’m surprised that he buys it uncritically. Might it not be a more complex issue that the modernist ‘ideal’ is yes, a bit nihilistic, but that’s not a romanticized fetish but perhaps only a rueful conclusion about meaning and life? Nah. It’s about cushions. The overstuffed cushions and Victorian details of a classic six spin a yarn that we may have attacked and devalued pretty thoroughly in philosophical circles, but when it comes time to shuffle off this mortal coil, staring down a stark, empty hallway isn’t the last image we want. A lie about continuity and generations and return and afterlife is far more comforting, regardless of ceiling height

Because we can find us some 11-foot ceilings downtown, and some pretty sumptuous luxury on the part of 40 Bond, which has been the desperate hope of all us avant gardists that hiring the right guy(s) really could forestall the march of places such like the Sculpture for Living. Competing on a per square foot price point, and featuring windows that, frankly, are so big they scare me, everyone probably did the same awkward double take when the images were first leaked. Herzog & de Meuron, who walk an incredibly fine line of material mastery, formal innovations, and finding elegant and clever solutions to age old programs, all without like seeming to be the houseboys for the ultra rich and tasteful, were finally going to kick the legs from underneath this pastiche, be it Gluckman on Kenmare, or Stern on CPW.

Except they don’t seem to have. Sure, those windows are big. But all they are is big windows, with odd and not very interesting extrusions clipped to them. On the upper floors, the plans actually establish a degree of parti rigor rarely seen, but, wow, how about those townhouses? That is the hell you get when developer mandates rule. The renderings actually demonstrate some saving grace, but there is no escaping the fact that the plans are sliver better than something you would see Scarano dump on Berry Street.

Everyone is waiting for the big reveal on those cast aluminum gates, but the whole shebang is going nowhere fast. And that’s sad, since rumors are it’s selling slower than hoped (plenty of units left), and the success of Stern’s project is going to grind down the chance of something interesting. Of course, when that interesting is the sort of tripe we get from Asymptote or Winka Dubbeldam, well, no one really has anywhere to turn. I guess we all have to put our money on Norten.

My formative years, and perhaps those responsbile for my bad attitude, were spent in the south. A roommate in the early years was a fella, though not southern, who took to the spirit of redneck chivalry rather adroitly. Eschewing architecture for preservation, mostly because he had a hankering — and talent — for woodworking, he bought a pickup and befriended more locals than students.

He spent afternoons driving around, a ritual that included lots of whistling at southern belles. He was the charming sort who could get away with backing up an entire block to smile at a stranger, fully expecting acknowledgment. Like any roué, failure or success did not deter. One day he called out enthusiastically at a woman who I wouldn’t normally characterize as a recipient of such attentions. Pointing this out, he replied with the rationalization, “Like my grandpappy always said: ‘Sometime you gottta whistle at the ugly ones!’”.

That comment is the essence of the limits of preservation, particularly to designers. Last week, the AIA celebrated Architecture Week by thumbing its nose at the segment of the preservation community one might called blue-haired, hosting Brad Cloepfil, who didn’t mince words, telling everyone that 2 Columbus Circle was a one of the ugly ones, and he wasn’t willing to turn his head even an inch to acknowledge it. Rick Bell gave him big props, reiterating the position of the local AIA (and insuring Bob Stern won’t be writing any checks any time soon) that there is no merit to continuing any preservation hearings on its behalf.

Thanks to the dimwitted critical skills championed by our preznit, we have become a culture of strident myopia, so this, like the discussion (a termed used very charitably) about the WTC site, this one has devolved into one either being against design quality in favor of blind historicism, or an example of screaming hypocrisy on the part of architects who demand preservation of questionable buildings and then turn a blind eye the minute an opportunity arises.

Though I’m clearly partisan, the reason this debate continues at all has to do with the poorly articulated vision of preservation — or its outright misrepresentation — by the Landmarks West! people, who are persisting, even in the face of eight lawsuits. The ever present cudgel of Penn Station is raised over the shoulders by every group or person that finds some corner of their world is about to be changed without adequate consult. Every stick, crack in the sidewalk, or dying shrub becomes a potential Penn Station. Save it all!

People like old buildings. I do. And when you only have, say, ten of them from 400 years ago, you probably should try and keep them around. But most people tend to lose their stridency when the find out preservation often means they can’t pick a paint color, or put a sun porch out back. They will like it even less if they find out that it means that have to keep things like Westin Times Square around, well, indefinitely.

Good preservation is inherently, like any good design practice, an exercise in taste making. Our strange obsession with a charade of meritocracy and egalitarianism, which seems not to infect areas where physical dexterity or other outward skills are required, empowers people who — let’s put this delicately — shouldn’t be asked to match a shirt and tie in the morning, be on equal footing with someone who has spent years thinking about what a building or a business card should look like. Someone has to say, “well, this isn’t actually that nice.”

Plenty of people have so far, though their skills at doing so, and their diplomacy, have varied. Everyone has learned to keep Holly Hotchner under wraps. Cloepfil is more measured, calling it a “’moment in style,’ but not a pivotal work”. That framing underscores the bifurcation in the preservation mind, which rankles at the notion that something as capricious as a human mind can make a gradation of value about objects, instead of kowtowing to the implacable truth of Mother Time, but nonetheless is just fine with telling people that a size of brick is ‘out of character’.

Though it has been rightfully pointed simply because a building has been neglected is no justification for demolition, at least without a hearing, except this building has had one. And it was neglected in the middle of Manhattan, 30 years after the sea change of Penn Station, for years. MAD took the site expecting to be able to make significant changes, and this has been known for years. The commission acted. Hearing were held, rulings made. It’s time pack up and go home, Landmarks West!

UPDATE: I know it seems like well-planned synergy, but isn’t: turns out I was painting the AIA as tad more strident (I cast my irresponsbility in the direction of the good folks at the Observer, who aren’t afraid to mince words) than they want to be. In fact, they are sponsoring a roundtable today (Columbus Day, for anyone who has missed the point) on this very topic, with speakers to include: Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, Vice President at The Related Properties; Thomas Mellins, author and architectural historian, Christopher Nolan, Vice President for Capital Projects at the Central Park Conservancy and Phillip Pittruzello, Vice President for Corporate Real Estate at Time-Warner. They welcome the Landmarks West! folks, as well as anyone else wanting to particpate (go ask Phil why the most expensive mall in the world is so damn bland!) in a conversation about the past, present and future of Columbus Circle. 6PM at the Center.

There was a moment when the ‘Chinatown Bus’ had it’s hipster glory. Like most elements of hipster culture, the frisson of receiving an unearned entitlement — cheap transport — intermingled with ironic slumming made for a perfect storm of on-a-whim trips to places as far flung as Boston and Baltimore. Until, of course, everyone soon realized that there was a reason everyone just visited these places (and barely that), and that cheap, long distance bus transit was as unappealing as it was in the days of Kerouacian yore without even for accounting the increase in danger as a result of lax regulation.

This is well in-line with the history of bus transport, which, even as does create mobility for the least fortunate, is not on par with the Delta Shuttle. Given the lack of direct interstate route sales of any quantity, or the absurd route scheduling of Greyhound, it takes too long to get anywhere to make a getaway a frivolous exercise.

The trip to my hometown, only 420 miles west, is an eleven-hour journey, on a good night. By traveling any additional 70 miles west-ish, this can be reduced via a red-eye express from Cleveland that clocks in nine (with the added bonus of a single stop at some godforsaken truck stop in central Pennsylvania that sells only two kinds of periodicals: porn and gun magazines, side-by-side, with a complete lack of irony). I’ve made the trip only a few times: the first I was surrounded by itinerant prostitutes making the trip home to West Virginia (one brought their twelve year old daughter in what I can only hope wasn’t a work trip); the next, a man acting very oddly and carrying only a small cardboard box, who finally blurted out to his seat mate he was looking for a strip club, as he had literally just gotten on the bus from his release in prison in, wait for it, West Virginia.

It’s a shame, because the bus can be a democratizing transit option. But, like most models we idealize from Europe or some parts of Asia, the scale and relative lack of density of our country relative to, say, Denmark, create challenges that are rarely overcome by dissolute planners and car obsessed localities — a failing that can be fatal. And so we end up with a grey market of often essential options, but ones never seeming so palatable or glamorous.

I used to live on west, west 57th Street (which was odd because it is a recognized locale for relatives who have no concept of what Hell’s Kitchen is like), and nighttime travel used to take me through Columbus Circle, either for the train or for the park. I know it seems hard to believe, but Columbus Circle was mostly an abandoned, concrete plaza. Not quite so bad to merit a really negative adjective, but yet another one of those residual semi-public spaces that were at the tail-end of bad planning and the fiscal tribulations of the seventies. I know Bob Stern lives in some soft-focus recollection about its significance, but what I recall is the unattractive hulk of the Coliseum, which seemed to feature craft fairs and flea markets inside and out, a wide apron of bland sidewalk, and the even more dismal 2 Columbus Circle.

But, at night, late, it was oddly alive. I remember seeing, often, four or five buses lined up on the edge, with long lines of people waiting to board. I know that those who rely on buses for regional transit often hold to very inconvenient schedules, but seeing what looked like entire families boarding buses around midnight was baffling.

The scene was not unlike the proverbial departure for camp, though more restrained, what I assumed to be a result of the hour, and large number of kids. The riders seemed to be mostly not white, which is not unusual given the congruence between economic status and race, but more so disproportionately women. This I chalked up to the other sad convention of woman-as-caregiver. It seemed to be not exactly pleasant, but as good as getting on a bus at midnight could get, with all the logistical frustrations that would come with bringing a couple small kids to what was more or less a parking lot and standing around for an hour waiting to board.

I wondered about the location. It made sense physically, since the buses and lines of passengers needed space, and not much traffic was in the area at that time. It looked to be one of those vaguely unregulated events that had gone on for so long that everyone assumed that somewhere it was approved, but really it was the essence of any almost-legal bus service — necessary for marginal populations, so the city turns a blind eye, failing to provide what might be expected as a matter of civic responsibility.

Long after I left, and stopped seeing this ritual, and probably even after the construction of the glory that is the Time Warner Center, I discovered — incidentally, through an article in the Voice — the purpose: the buses were overnight transit to upstate prisons, in places like Albion, Dannemora, and Bare Hill. With visiting hours that start in the morning, the buses make round trip runs that deposit passengers just as they begin, and return immediately after. The steady increase in prison population, even without the deleterious effect of the Rockefeller Laws, has meant that this is a strong cash flow business, and this is a city where an opportunity is not passed on.

Turns out among those who work regularly in this community these services are well known (and why wouldn’t they be? So much so, even a film was made.). A friend who works with the Correctional Association told me what they were before the story was half done. And, like any seeming esoteric event, makes its way in the City section of the Times.

I wondered what happened to the Columbus Circle pickup. Even as it occurred well after hours, I really doubted that the corporate masters of TW would consent (even though, for a while there, it looked like the AOL merger might have necessitated some spouses getting familiar with the option). A review of the most recent schedule I could find indicates the pickup has moved a block south. I wonder if anyone walking out of Masa or Per Se for a postprandial stroll sees it now and wonders like I do. I doubt it. Given the entrance to the food court is on 60th Street, I’m sure their car service spirits them away before they have to think about how many of their neighbors are spending the evening.

Previous Lore:
060105: Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances.
052505: Neither city, nor subway, but Empire.
050405: Like Usual?
042705: The best thing ever.

After a spike in his approval numbers, a newfound love for outer boroughs, and this week’s flipping of the bird at City Council, it looks like hizzoner is making a play for the now apparenly vacant title of Iron Mike.

Fixing a steely gaze on the perpetually seeming like he is running Student Council Gifford Miller, the mayor vetoed the no confidence vote — in the form of a proposed zoning change which would have obviated the proposal — the Council delivered to Bloombergs’s proposed waste management plan. Miller presented an alternate, wrapped up in the expected rhetoric that Mayor’s plan dumped trash on the poor and less white regions of the city. The operative phrase for Miller was “I don’t think it’s ideal to locate any kind of a transfer station in such a residential neighborhood in the middle of a park”. Apparently the man has never been to 145th Street. But no matter, because his wealthy, white consituents probably haven’t either. See, Bloomberg was only projecting that one solid waste transfer station — that’s a fancy name for a place for where they will empty residential garbage trucks onto barges, to be sent to a poor, rural community that will be paid to bury our trash — be located in Manhattan. Ttaking the share the pain approach, every borough got one.

The rub? The only Manhattan site was square in Miller’s (rich, white) district. Miller must have not read the entire plan, because after a day of everyone pointing out that his spirited critique was driven by pandering to his base (which, to be fair, he’s paid to do) and looking for some traction for his mayoral campaign, he relented and acquiesced to a transfer station that would only handle paper collected for recycling. He also airly suggested that the rest of our exceedlingly complex waste management problem could be solved by building a couple of transfer stations further south, and nowhere near any parks. Except for the one that lines the West Side and would seperate the proposed stations from the rest of the city.

If you were wondering if such massive logistical concerns could really hinge on narrowly self-interested posturing, let us only look across the way at the Lil’ Borough That Couldn’t, Staten Island. Having cemented Guliani’s reelection margin, he repaid their support with two massively disproportionate decisions that have wreaked havoc on Manhattan and Brooklyn. The first is the one that resulted in the current travails, the closing of Fresh Kills — the massive city-owned landfill, now best known as the site of most of the remains of the WTC. Granted, something needed to be done, since the site was on track to become on the second human-made object visible from space (after the Great Wall). But the closing was a political decision, because Guliani never got around to developing an alternative beyond “Send it to Virginia” leaving the city with far more truck traffic as trash normally barged out to Staten Island was routed over and under the rivers. The second was the change from two-way to one-way tolls for the Verazzano Narrows Bridge crossing. Done as a sap to Staten Island residents yapping about how unfair the tolls were, they were changed to favor those exiting Staten Island, resulting in a massive surge of truck traffic able to exploit a series on one-way toll-free crossings to traverse the city, ending at Canal Street and the Holland Tunnel. Though the subsequent closing of the tunnel to truck traffic after 9/11 relieved this somewhat, we shouldn’t rely on terrorist threats to drive traffic planning.

So we are awash in trucks, a clear problem (of cost, quality of life and pollution) and Miller’s plan does little to alleviate that. Lacking a more detailed presentation, such as available from the mayor, one must rely on the most detailed version given, via the Times. Most everyone who offers a comment says that there’s no there there to the alternate. Leading with the line that the city dumps its nastiest facilities on the least fortunate population (abandoning the CNG plan for city buses and refusing to relocate the disproportionately dense collection of depots in Harlem anyone?) is pretty rote for Democrats, who haven’t done much to help the situation. Miller doesn’t really say much about the propriety of transfer stations not in his district — meaning, are the poor getting screwed again or does he think the other three locations are fair? Aside from seeming to dump this plan on his leading challenger, it should be noted that Bloomberg puts his trash where his house is — East 91st street isn’t all that far from hizzoner’s ceremonial and functional homes.

The mayor deserves a little more credit for this effort than he was demanding for his misguided Stadium fetish, so Miller should not descend to knee-jerk politicking about such an important issue. It’s a mess of a issue, one that potentially encompasses major shifts in city infrastructure, reaching all the way down to the mundane of how responsible we may need to be about the trash we store in our homes. And with a tertiary relationship to other still-tabled issues, such as the Brooklyn Rail Tunnel (a plan to connect Brooklyn to the mainland via a rail tunnel, enabling the underutilized Brooklyn port facilities to be competitive with the next generation of deep water container ships and potentially providing a way to transfer large amounts of waste without carting it over land), sniping over who gets stuck with the transfer station is awfully short-sighted. We are creaking along towards the completion of Water Tunnel No. 3, an essential addition to our infrastructure that took a good half-century to realize. As long as the Midwest is mired in the economic doldrums, we can stagger along without a viable solid waste plan, but trash is the sort of thing that will cause even the most hardscrabble community to eventually turn up their nose. And once they figure out just how poorly prepared we are, it will get far more pricey to buy our way out of this mess.

So has the Whitney succeeded, or failed? It’s hard to figure out, since the
current decision challenges us to declaim our pessimist/optimist stance, the Landmarks Preservation Committee having handed down a Solomonic decree to cleave Renzo Piano’s proposed solution neatly in half, mandating that one of the ‘contributing’ townhouses be retained, while one ‘non-contributing’ structure can be removed.

The LPC got all academic, allowing that the rending be also a doubling, permitting the Whitney to shave off the back-half of the one-half that they must retain. Everyone is acting like this half-assed (sorry, it seemed too obvious) decision is a victory all around, one of those vaunted acts of compromise, without realizing that Solomon’s wisdom was not effected by actually bifurcating the infant. At least Chuck Close didn’t mince words, observing that the Museum of Arts and Design is allowed strip 2 Columbus Circle bare “while we’re not allowed to take down one crummy brownstone.”

It’s a fair point, since the every time another act of preservation results in pinning a façade to an otherwise bland behemoth (take a walk down 42nd Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where you can see the remnant of a theater that will be reconstructed as part of the Bank of America tower, or the Mohawk Atelier on Duane Street where the same is being done on a smaller scale) pretty much aligns the preservation movement with the intellectual bankruptcy of Disney. The Whitney would be better served by proposing a completely blank wall where they could get someone like Bill Viola to project the image of various ‘contributing’ structures.

The neighbors are still steamed, something about the big tower that will spring up behind the contributing façade ruining the character of the area, or something. Big buildings have no place in Manhattan, we know. If only we could bring back scurvy and indentured servitude, it would be a historically appropriate utopia. What no one is complaining about, not even the preservationists, which is odd, since the argument bolsters their position, is how bland and uninteresting the Piano scheme is.

Hmmm, let’s see. Museum with great character and a compelling form that actually relates to its entrance, what is the best way to expand? Well, slap a featureless warehouse addition on the side, and put a sliver of glass between it and the original. Studio 101. Hey, maybe the interconnections can be glass bridges! Ooooh. And when you get some really bad direction from a government bureaucracy, what do you do? Radically reexamine your concept? Nah, you just cut it down the middle, eliminating the one putatively reasonable argument for moving the entrance wholesale (circulation).

The plan provided (a surprise in these days of meaningless renderings) shows the original as none too inspired, one of the two entry points — revolving doors — sitting awkwardly under the corner of the tower above. It appears that the main stair of the existing building will still be a prominent feature, though the state of the existing elevator, a grand experience now, is unclear. The Times also thoughtfully translates ‘piazza’ for you. The revised version is simply an even more jumbled interpretation of the same, with the entry way stepping back in chunks, a result of the half a building that is now required.

All of this sits south of the monolithic party wall that terminates the edge of the current site, itself too historic for alteration. With the exception of the canopy that looks to peek past, the entirety of the new entrance will be obscured from any oblique view approaching from the north, particularly on the east side of Madison. The rendering doesn’t show if the bridge that leads to the current entrance will be modified in some way to indicate that such a formally descriptive signifier has been entirely divested of meaning. Maybe they intend to commission a clever aphorism from Jenny Holzer that involves ‘vestigial’. Or they can just pick from the list. Me, I’ll take “Ambition is just as dangerous as complacency” for today.

Crain’s NY (print) reports in their May 16 edition that Landmark West! (a group that sounds like they were formed about eight minutes ago — not unlike this one — but their website claims a far grander lineage) has hired The Advance Group, credited by Crain’s as “the consulting firm that helped union workers at The Plaza Hotel rescue more rooms from condo conversion.”

I guess they figure that a Historic Register designation would save all those union jobs doing exactly what, currently? Shoring up the cyclone fencing enveloping 2 Columbus Circle? Really, if we ever needed any more evidence that preservation is the province of the idle middle class, this is it. Though I doubt anyone, excepting the workers and their immediate dependents, thought the Plaza fight was primarily about jobs, it was one of those uncomfortable moments of ‘alliance building’ that we don’t deserve in any case. If it weren’t apparent that the converted condos wouldn’t sell like hotcakes, or if The Plaza was bursting with patrons, we would have never ended up in that fight to begin with. But we get what we deserve, and in the end, a handful of jobs were ‘saved’ though I don’t doubt for a moment that those braying about preservation would sacrifice every union job on the Upper East Side to keep their Eloise fantasy intact.

So their angle is going to be interesting, with no jobs to save, no prospect of investment from another source (yeah, there’s a good idea, Bob: if you like the building so damn much, why not get Disney to buy it?) or even suggestions for reuse, this is going to be one of the more interesting struggles in preservation: a building that almost no one finds attractive, no one has any nostalgic attachment to, without any alternative plans, and decidedly unlike any notion of what a ‘preserved’ building looks like is supposed to win the hearts of New Yorkers (or, really, the LPC and Historic Register) enough to justify keeping it mothballed another twenty years.

On the flip side, Brad Cloepfil is doing his best ‘aw-shucks’ bit — while also managing a nice shout out to his continental peeps (which Solomon misses completely, clearly not familiar enough with his CV, but that’s because everyone looks provinicial from the fishbowl on 43rd). He talks like he has nothing to lose, probably because he doesn’t. A small foothold in the city, pocketing fees with none of the complexities of actually building, and musuem commissions piling up all over the place while Holly Hotchner fumes at every biddy on the Upper West Side. He doesn’t need to make it here, because he’s already making it everywhere.

I’ve been doing some cursory reading of Gates commentary and heard from a number of friends. Many people and reviews have focused on the visual transformation: the vistas that are changed by the presence of a framing device, and other formal effects. One thing I have noted from the photographs, which isn’t so apparent when there, is the effect of framing people — and by framing I mean in the narrowest sense. Some longer photos make the people look almost trapped, given the propensity to walk through and not around The Gates. This is the result of a couple of circumstances: more areas are off-limits during this season, and the ground has been damp much of the past week and thus people are not encouraged to break away and find disparate points from which that can observe The Gates from within the park, but outside the boundary of any path.

This is as much an effect of how we understand public space and the intent of English garden planning as the structure of the artwork. Vistas were carefully constructed, and the placement of paths was a subtle way to control the experience of the view. One person had commented to me as they were being raised that it was interesting to see the paths marked in a much more evident way. Now, they not only mark the walks, they become much more restrictive framing devices.

It also reveals the impact of the current preservation strategies. Most of the larger areas that Olmstead created were intended as commons, places for people to congregate under the same ideal of shared space as found in English towns. Now, most of the common spaces in the park are bordered by fencing, and several have been reserved for sporting events. So there is little relief to the path movement, and this is one of the instances where the failure of such policies is starkly in evidence (the typical argument is that the wear and tear of foot travel makes it impossible to remove the fencing).

One friend commented to me that The Gates also make travel more directional, with most crowds moving in a single direction. This also has somewhat to do with framing. On narrower paths, The Gates’ structure constricts the walkway by more than ten percent. Such small changes have a magnified impact; add to it perhaps a sense that most art consumption experiences tend to be directional, and many people probably fall into the convention of following the person in front of them as part of how one experiences art.

Both these conditions are unfortunate and not likely an intentional result. The fascination of Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s work is the defamiliarization one experiences from the intervention, and constricting oneself to such a determined path reduces this experience (and limits one’s understanding). So wear some boots and climb some fences (or least some rocks).

The Times does a little op-ed for the sticks, noting that Frederic Schwartz is having a little trouble with the — um, sorry, this is obvious — spiraling costs for his proposed memorial for Westchester County.

His initial claim that the project could be built for $200,000 turned out to be off by a factor of four, and then some. The current projection is for $900,000. He can now take a seat at the crowded table of architects who become notorious for misleading and/or bullying the public over costs (the best story of which I know is that of I. M. Pei, who was nicknamed “You Will Pay” by the Dallas press when the city’s symphony hall was under construction — a story I have never been able to verify, at least courtesy of Google, so it may be apocrypha).

I don’t really have an opinion on the value aspect (the numbers aren’t that large, after all), I only question the potential ethics of the circumstance, since the act of creating a memorial, for artists and architects, is often not one of selfless contribution, but a key step in their own memorializing. It would be very irresponsible to charge Schwartz with any particular misrepresentation, but there is an ethical component of design that mandates balancing concept and cost. One should suggest only what is plausible within the expected parameters (though I don’t believe the Westchester competition had a preordained budget), or have a clear enough understanding of what one’s recommendations will require, and on this count there a failure that should be acknowledged. Though it won’t benefit Schwartz (he’s working for free) as often is the case with cost overruns, it still sullies a process that is imaginably raw for supporters of the project — though I should note I am not one of them. I don’t support the welter of monumetalizing that is underway in the region. The closest thing to a reasonable suggestion I know of is
Tadao Ando’s, and nothing moving past the proposal stage has come close to the intent of a concept such as this.

So getting up at 6:00 AM on four hours sleep for a week both attenuates one’s posting schedule and increases one’s respect for anyone with both a labor-intensive job and a social-intensive calendar. Just don’t say I don’t suffer for art.

The remainder of the week doesn’t produce any celebrity sightings, just lots of Germans. We manage to get done ahead of schedule, as did just about everyone else. The last snag was poor documentation: only at the very end did inventory catch up with installation enough to determine that several locations were marked incorrectly, leading to a shortage of particular sizes that apparently were manufactured last night. In our end of the park, Gate raising pretty much wrapped up yesterday in the early afternoon, though four pesky locations weren’t finished until this morning. Christo and Jeanne-Claude showed up at what was claimed to the be the last raising, and signed our dorky uniforms (this appellation was provided by a team-mate who has worked on the last seven projects, and apparently is a consistent feature of their projects).

Our work done, we got to sightsee and play on the swings (though I was admonished later with the fact that swinging without children is a ticketable offense — is this true, and is Bloomberg responsible for this too?). I have been asked a number of times the best place to be. Having walking about 70% of the park in its not-quite-finished state, I have basically two ways to respond:

1. Pick your favorite place in the park and go there. Regardless of the number of Gates, that which you know well will result in a better understanding of the transformation. The project was mounted in February because the trees are bare, and even in the areas with the most ground cover, you can still see multitudes.

2. Walk the whole damn thing. They worked on this 26 years. A couple hundred people put in tens of thousands of hours. It’s a complete work that is best experienced in its entirety. Give yourself a couple of hours, and explore. That said, there is little point in going to several points that might seem obvious: the Reservoir and the Belvedere Castle do not provide much of a vista.

The patterns of the pathways drive the locations, and thus Olmstead’s plan is a major contributor to the process. More Gates are located in the southern end of the park, but in the open areas of the north (the North Meadow and the Harlem Meer) provide more unobstructed views, and in some instances have much longer stretches of Gates. The north also tends to be far less crowded.

It’s hard to get a sense of the interest the project is generating because my entire week has been filled with orange (sorry, saffron) vinyl and wet, difficult bolts. The preponderance of press and the internal documentary team created a strange sense of artifice to everything we did, as 70 crews were doing the same thing over and over, using by and large the same process. How many times you can shoot a Gate? Of course, had I waited that long, I too might ask someone to take a lot of pictures, just to prove that it happened. And each member of that team was carefully documenting it over and over. Thankfully, this hyper-awareness of participating in something that was laden with the air of history and significance did not prevent it from simply being fun. Snippets of interesting moments will certainly be uncovered, but at my last encounter with a film crew this week, the most accurate response I had was my strained attempt at ironic humor when my team was asked why we did it, and no one leapt at the chance to respond: “We didn’t practice our sound bites”. Chirsto said just about every time he spoke that there was no answer to the questions of why or what. And knowing, or assuming, an answer to that isn’t a prerequisite of attending. It’s a hell of a thing, no matter what. Go take a look (after, roughly, 9:30 AM tomorrow — Feb 12).

The ‘ballroom’ at the Boat House is not as grand as I would have assumed. It certainly doesn’t hold all 600 of us. There isn’t enough coffee, but there is plenty of cocoa and pumpkin loaf. And for once, my last name does not land me in the most egregious line. I celebrate this by snubbing former Texas Governor Ann Richards. It goes like this: a polite, if reserved woman responds to a query from a man next to me about her origins (Austin), and that continues into a discussion with another Texan. I assume the reserve is due to perhaps worry that such an admission will produce a sneer (which it has, in my head). Later, I hear two men talking, one very excited that “Ann Richards is here.” Immediately I realize I have just been the shitty, East Coast liberal-elite jerk to my mother’s political idol.

You can’t top that, especially since most of the rest of the morning is spent standing around. My natural leadership skills, clearly demonstrated in line with Governor Richards, must have made quite an impression, as I have been awarded a crew leader position. This means I get to keep time records and pass out meal tickets.

After taking a very long ride around the park loop, we get to our drop point, and most of our gear is gone. We suspect greedy crews overreached and made off with our nifty cart. After some negotiations and a little misappropriation of our own, we finally mount our first gate at around 11:30 AM (four hours after arriving). This is not a pace that gives anyone confidence, but once we sort out the supply chain, the rest of the day is pretty uneventful — if building the largest art project in the history of this town can be uneventful in any way. Locals do to their best to be blasé, and I feel like I’m on a film crew. Having been the guy who has charged past innumberable hapless PA’s, I try to be humble. It’s a beautiful day, with most of us in shirtsleeves by early afternoon. Though it doesn’t look like our fortune will extend through the weekend, it does call to mind my father’s favorite card playing wisdom “Every little bit hurts.”