The stars aligned twenty years ago when The Gates opened: I lived nearby, I had a digital camera (the i-Phone was still two years in the future) and I was in love. Christo and Jeanne-Claude provided New Yorkers with a unique public art project that turned Central Park into an orange-accented playpen, full of unabashed joy and wonder, just what the city needed in the long, dispiriting wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It took weeks and hundreds of laborers to stage The Gates. I noticed this sign shortly after Christmas 2004. Christo and Jeanne-Claude first had come to my attention, vaguely, a decade earlier when DIFFA, an AIDS organization inspired by their environmental art work, had decorated the beach in Fire Island Pines with pink umbrellas for a memorable fund raiser I couldn't afford.
Even a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic could see the planning had been meticulous, as it had been for the artists' wrapping of the Reichstag. An exhibit I'd seen in Berlin documenting that event had blown me away three years earlier.
Delivery of the frames really began to heighten the sense of anticipation that had been building during a cold winter.
Florian and I biked to Central Park for the official unfurling on a Saturday morning.
Dozens of friendly young guides used tennis balls atop long poles to release the banners.
They wore custom vests.
When I spotted a black limo on Park Drive, I shouted "It's them!" and we chased the vehicle like paparazzi to the top of Cherry Hill where Christo and the chain-smoking, flame-haired Jeanne-Claude held a brief press conference.
We had to ask ourselves: how could something like this--which required the approvals of the Bloomberg administration and the Central Park Conservancy--have gone so right?
And then it snowed!
The tennis ball poles came in handy when the wind tangled the banners.
For a little more than two weeks, the ordinary became extraordinary.
Never ever was I a less jaded New Yorker. Happy, happy days.
