As New York's long winter draws to a close, Polly Devlin looks back on two rival attractions that brought about civic bonding in Central Park
I was walking through Central Park early one morning in the snow, watching witchy New York women in leopard-skin snow suits go in for a bit of cross-country skiing as if they were in the wilderness of Canada, avoiding the pugs underfoot and looking up at the great saffron swags of fabric that lined the park above and around me with incredulity and delight. On this bright, clear, sparkling white-and-blue day, clean and washed as Delft china, the park had become both a huge art happening and a snowy playground. Thousands of people were slipping, sliding, skiing, exclaiming, filming and getting together the way people in Manhattan do when something happens to transform them from separate, cranky, idiosyncratic individuals into a coalescent swarm. When this happens they become New Yorkers in a Cole Porterish sense: you feel that at any minute they might erupt into a high-kicking routine where the Bronx is up and the Battery is down.
Most of us were out to see The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's staggering 23 miles of orange curtains flapping in the wind, a project that they had been dreaming of doing for 25 years and that became feasible after Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor and, in 2003, gave them permission. Some of the crowds were heading for a rival attraction, to a vantage point where a couple of red-tailed hawks were building a large and untidy nest on top of an arched window, many stories up. I should say rebuilding, because some of the managers of the block - on Fifth Avenue, so it's a pretty chic location - objected to this unlovely eyrie hanging from its eyebrows and sent someone to poke the thing apart with a pointy stick. Well, stone the crows. The outrage. The two hawks, Pale Male and Lola, have become a cause celebre, have their own website and are the most precious things on the Upper East Side. And that is saying something.
Watches are kept day and night to prevent interference, and cameras and telescopes trained on the building transmit the whole business of feeding - an ugly business, but fascinating, watching a mouse's liver being torn out - to crowds watching in vivid detail on enormous video screens in the park. These squatters are not house-proud, but Pale Male knows how to treat a girl, bringing her tasty, unspeakable titbits. If you want to see it for yourself (and it is a wonderful sight), then go to www.palemale.com.
Between The Gates and the nest, I didn't know where to turn next for excitement, so I turned to my friend Judith, who is on the women's committee of Central Park Conservancy, an association dedicated to its restoration that has, over the years, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The park has been changed out of all recognition through this partnership between City of New York Parks & Recreation and Central Park Conservancy, and you can see it all at www. centralparknyc.org.
When I lived there it was the badlands, with everything derelict, the grass bald, the buildings graffiti-covered and boarded up, the monuments shabby and sad. I remember Seamus Heaney's story about Central Park then. He asked one of New York's finest how long it should take to cross the park. The cop answered: "I wouldn't know. No one's ever made it." It is a far cry from that now, with almost every building, lake and monument restored and a grand new railing erected around the reservoir.
Judith took me on a tour in one of the conservancy's jeeps. We meandered along the great saffron way, which was like a series of coloured ribbons threading the park into a vast ruffle in the middle of the city. The park is bigger than you'd think - much. It covers 843 acres - or 6 per cent of Manhattan - and has 58 miles of paths, so The Gates were a big deal. They cost €15 million for a start, and a lot of people needed to be convinced before they could become reality.
The opposition that had to be overcome to get the frames into position, the work that went into them, hardly bears thinking about. As someone who has to lie in a darkened room when a key refuses to turn in a lock, the idea of getting people to agree to the concept of erecting 23 miles of useless, but large, structures through one of the world's busiest parks, disrupting traffic and transforming an essential amenity into something else - and all for only a fortnight - hardly bears thinking about. But not for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They just change how we look at the world around us.
They persuaded town planners, city councils, conservation committees, public-safety groups, friends of pugs and squirrels, committees against frightening horses, obstacles-to-a-view persons, flat-earthers, people against arty-farty projects, fairness-towards-saffron and agin-it-for-the hell-of-it groups to let them go ahead, for no reasons other than passion and joy.
But perhaps 23 miles of apertures hung with pleated saffron curtains is small beer compared with dressing the Reichstag in a frock, packing the Pont Neuf, in Paris, so tidily it could be stamped and posted, running miles of fences through the most conservative areas of the US and erecting thousands of enormous umbrellas in rice fields in Japan and the Californian desert, simultaneously - all of which they have done, with no subsidy of any kind.
As with all their work, the artists pay for the project by selling Christo's drawings - the smallest goes for €23,000. They don't even take a cut from the merchandising, although they would make a lot of money if they did. Four million people came to see The Gates; posters - at €75 each - T-shirts and postcards were flying out of the shops and off the stalls.
Christo is a small, vivid man behind large bottle-glass spectacles; Jeanne-Claude is a small, vivid woman behind nothing. She is so upfront you can see her from a mile away, and with her flaming saffron hair she is a kind of beacon, lighting up any room she is in. And the rooms she and Christo live in are the great spaces and monuments of the world, as well as a shabby five-storey house down in SoHo, just above Canal Street, where they have lived for 40 years, every room of which is an archaeology of wrapped treasures.
When I went to meet them at the Boathouse, the congenial restaurant on the lake in the middle of Central Park, everyone rose to their feet and applauded. I said to Jean Claude: "You must be so pleased that's it's such a success." She said, snappily: "No. We're so pleased that it's so beautiful."
Along the route, monitors guarded the gates, carrying spears topped with tennis balls to nudge up the fabric if needed, but there was no damage: no graffiti, no vandalism, no storm damage. If you went out early, and brazenly accosted these monitors with enough chutzpah, they would reluctantly yield up a piece of saffron fabric from a capacious pocket. But mostly they said: "We're fresh out." Apparently, it cost €45,000 just to cut the little squares they gave away, and now people are selling them on the internet.
The Gates project did something no one could have foreseen. It brought people together in an opposite, Newtonian reaction to 9/11. There was hope, gaiety, optimism and incredulity that the thing had happened under their noses and was there to be seen, enjoyed, revelled in and walked under. There were detractors, of course, people who thought they were useless and hideous. I thought, when I listened to them, of Auden's great strictures on art of a different discipline. "Poetry makes nothing happen; it survives in the valley of its making."
One man was shouting into his mobile phone - "It ain't nothing but a bunch of big old shower curtains" - and, given a certain squinty outlook and temperament, he was right. But given any sort of open-heartedness and delight in the variousness of things, it was a 23-mile marvel.
On my last morning in New York I went out early; there was only one other person to be seen, and of course he was a lamebrain making a beeline for me in the dawn light, talking animatedly to himself. Avert the eyes, I reassured myself, look invisible, hurry past. He waggled a big knotted finger in my face. "Be not deceived," he hissed. "This is a Chinese communist conspiracy." No, mate, I thought, making no sudden movements: this is a miracle.