Gated Community

“Is New York getting a dud?” my fellow Canadian in New York Dale Hrabi said to me on Friday. “Couldn’t they have wrapped Brooklyn Bridge or something?”

As the City prepared for the unveiling of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s latest project – The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005 – with everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-Gates articles in all the weekly glossies, daily human interest stories in the Metro section of the Times about the 600 “paid volunteers” setting up the 15,000 steel bases, and upscale hotel managers discussing their park-view suites Gates packages and their restaurants’ saffron-hued (to match the fabric) meals, the elephant in the collective living room was the $20-million question: would this project (funded by the artists) consisting of 7,500 nine-foot orange fabric curtains hung from 16-foot-high bars be as impressive as the artists’ wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin or surrounding Miami’s Biscayne islands in hot pink?

Also weighing on The Gates was the promise made by public figures that this gift to the people would be an antidote to the pall cast by the World Trade Center disaster – at this point, amongst the cowed liberal majority in New York, that’s code for the paradigm shift that made way for Bush’s re-election and the amorphous, non-stop gloom many of us have been feeling since.

The day before “The Unfurling” (as the vinyl curtains’ release from their “cocoons” at the top of the bars had come to be called), Jeanne-Claude, who likens her projects to her children, seemed unburdened by the fears of most expectant mothers. At the Friday press conference she declared with utter confidence in a sexy, stentorian Euro voice, “tomorrow, we will be ecstatic…”

Saturday morning it was cold for New York, just below freezing and clear, with a hazy February sun that both softened the fabric’s orange, and made it glow. Promises had been made for a climactic simultaneous unfurling sometime between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., but progress was more homespun and desultory. It took from 8:45 a.m. to 11 a.m. When a group of selected volunteers (paid minimum wage) finished releasing the gates in their section – the gates had been divided into 73 sections – they lolled around on the little carts, collecting the cardboard tubes around which the fabric had been wrapped. “I should keep one of these tubes for my drawings, man,” said a young soul-patched volunteer, idly rapping it with his knuckle.

The curtains were coming down mainly without a hitch, unfurling in the wind as planned, with the exception of a wayward one here and there, missed by the breeze. Viewers clapped as the volunteers improvised to get them down, jumping and prodding them free with the sticks used to unhook them.

Photo by Adam Brebner

As the artists slowly circled the park like movie stars, in a loaner $330,000 Maybach, small clusters of fans yelled “thank you” and clapped politely. But this wasn’t Michael Jordan in China. Surprisingly, the park wasn’t packed. There were some die-hards dressed in festive orange, but most of the crowd consisted of the regular mix: perpetual marathon trainers and Westminster matrons with chocolate labs, wheatons and retrievers in tow.

“How cool is this,” one man asked as Christo and Jeanne-Claude got back into their Maybach after a quick photo op elicited quiet applause. “C’mon people, I’m here from D.C, how cool is this?” he yelled, gesturing with his outstretched hands for the audience to show proper enthusiasm.

“Someone’s always wantin’ to change New York,” grumbled a homeless man as he noticed a motley gaggle of onlookers and uniformed community-association guards on the West 110th street entrance to Central Park, watching their section of the gates being unfurled.

Up where Harlem borders the park, it was actually possible to look down on stretches of The Gates free of people; this is where the work approaches the sublime. If you’re coming to see it, start here, early in the morning, before other visitors start cluttering up the otherworldly landscape.

Christo insists on the democracy of his projects: no tickets, no endorsements. But New York itself seems more and more like a democracy exclusively for the shockingly rich.

During the cold two-hour wait for the work to be fully unveiled, the fact that there was no public place you could go in any of the surrounding buildings – mostly door-manned co-ops – to get a bird’s-eye view of the gates, became irritatingly clear. Even the Mandarin Oriental Hotel's lobby bar on the 35th floor of the new Time Warner skyrise on Columbus Circle, which has the perfect vantage point, had been rented for a private party. Only guests at the hotel were allowed up.

This isn’t Christo’s fault. And there was an infectious, decidedly un-corporate vibe in the air. All over the park, and in the mall at the Time Warner Center, you could hear the sonorous words, “cocoon” and “unfurl,” coming out of the unlikeliest mouths, replacing “where’s Starbucks?” like everyone was murmuring the same poem.

And there was, I had to admit, in the February sun, a luminous, beatific feeling in the air, the sense that New York continues to shimmer above its often disappointing specificities, as something magical and blessed.

Ryan, a six-year-old visitor whining about how cold she was to her father, was immune to that feeling. “Mom’s going to ask how it was, and I’m going to say, ‘It’s horrible.’” Her father rolled his eyes at me and said, “The little art aficionado. She’ll appreciate it in 10 years.”