The Gates Returns—On Your Phone
Look up! Exactly 20 years ago this month, a saffron-colored trail blazed through 23 miles of Central Park. On the snow-covered pathways, from 59th to 110th streets, sweeping, elegant panels of bright nylon billowed in the wind, like curtains descended from the gray winter sky.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates was the largest work of public art Manhattan had ever seen, and a welcome balm for a time marked by lasting grief. “It lifted our spirits as the city recovered from the 9/11 attacks,” recalls former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was instrumental in bringing the project to life.
Now Bloomberg Philanthropies, NYC Parks, the Central Park Conservancy, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation are reviving the achievement via augmented reality, recreating on your phone several hundred gates where the originals once stood.
And at the Shed a free exhibition opening February 12 will feature many of the drawings, scale models, and proposals the artists started putting together decades ago, when Olmsted and Vaux’s urban oasis was in its sorriest state.
The couple sought to remind everyone of the park’s original glory, but three city administrations rejected it, considering the expense prohibitive. Finally, the artists suggested paying for it themselves, and Bloomberg saw The Gates for the valentine it was, the only installation the two émigrés ever completed in their adopted home.
For a city still wounded by tragedy, it was a gift of abundant warmth, a reminder of the healing power of radical imagination.
“The project seemed to find its own timing in a way that reflected Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s passion and perseverance,” says Vladimir Yavachev, the artists’ director of projects. “They loved engaging in the process of public art and creating something that was not confined to a museum.”
Now his organization, working with the digital design studios Dirt Empire and Superbright, have reanimated The Gates for the mobile era, developing virtual editions that can be experienced through the free Bloomberg Connects app between a stretch of walkways on the east and west sides near 72nd Street.
Perhaps only a fraction of the millions who witnessed the analog version will go ahead and relive in the palm of their hands this audacious experiment in community building, but if anyone can break the spell of the screen, especially for a generation reared on social media, it’s Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Town & Country, with the headline “The Great Work Continues.” SUBSCRIBE NOW
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