Open Air Art No. 2 –Spinning the Cube

On New Year’s Eve, Dianne and I were among the small crowd of people in Astor Place, walking around in that disjointed maze of traffic islands and converging intersections near 8th and Lafayette Streets. To our right was the 15-foot high cube sculpture, which stands pivoted on one of its corners like a bizarro globe of a flatlander world. Two men stopped to give the cube a push. It looked like work, but they got it moving. There was a lot of noise in the air, so I couldn’t tell if the cube itself also made noise, like a creaky gate with rusty hinges.

Open air sculptures in public places have to be built for abuse. The cube at Astor Place actually invites handling. Dianne and I stopped to watch the cube spin as the two men leaned into it and pushed. It was an impressionistic moment in the shadows of the night. A few minutes later we would duck into a small bar, Tribe, where the DJ would queue up Guy Lombardo’s rendition of Auld Lang Sine at the end of a boisterous countdown.

Last week, we found ourselves back in Astor Place again. I looked at the cube with a new curiosity, noticing a flyer taped near one of its corners and its blackness against the icy snow packed around it. I find that my mind turns to open air art wherever I find it these days, probably as a consequence of the Gates event drawing nearer.

From where we stood, I also saw the hundred-year old cupola of the Astor Place subway station, one of the original in the IRT system that helped usher into the 20th century a new era of speed. To my back was the Cooper Union building. The cube seemed to be sandwiched like a flea market layout of knickknacks from different centuries. I enjoyed its overlooked presence and the chaos of traffic and urban elements surrounding it.

In the lobby of the Cooper’s Union, a 19th century hand tinted photograph is on display that shows Cooper’s Union looming over the other buildings in the neighborhood, unlike today, where the scale has been reversed. It also shows a neat, treed street, not cluttered and busy. Undoubtedly, the day is coming when the immense potential to create a coordinated public space in Astor Place will be mulled over by some urban designers, and, once again, this chaotic corner might become a neat, treed public space. But however they choose to design it, the cube will be a part of their plan.

This past Sunday, as it turned out, the Times ran a short piece on the cube. After thirty-some years of spinning on its axis at the whims of passersby, the cube was recently found to be stuck in place. Who knows, maybe it was that final push on New Year’s Eve that finally did it.

The Times recalled the cube’s early history. It was installed in 1968 as part of a citywide event called “Sculpture and the Environment.” Back then, Cooper Union’s students protested its removal when the event was over, and somehow it has survived in place until today.

In 1968, it wasn’t unusual for students to raise their collective voice in protest. Typically, they widely disdained concepts representing their parents’ side of “the gap” and embraced the things from their side of “the gap.” The gap was the so-called generation gap, a term that faded from use quickly, but not before it got imbedded as the name for a store that would grow into a mega-clothing store chain.

I can understand how Rosenthal’s cube could fit the students’ ideas of art on their side of the gap. The piece strikes me as having a pop art sensibility, that Warholian feeling that imbues common day objects with artful pretense. Its kinetic aspect subverts notions identified with pedestal-sculpture, such as, the idea that art is not to be touched.

Sixties students related well to expanding ideas that left behind what they perceived were rigid conventions. If, on the other hand, the cube were to be perceived, for example, as an object from the post-war school of abstract expressionism, the 60’s protesters would have been left cold. That sort of intellectualism was from the other side of the gap. The cube would have become scrap metal once the citywide installation was through.

Instead, the cube was left in place, apparently the first open air modern-art sculpture accepted by the City. On Sunday, the Times reported that it couldn’t find anyone in charge of it. The Parks Department once told the cube’s artist Tony Rosenthal that they would henceforth take care of it, but this seems to be one of those unwritten agreements that faded away with time. (The Times didn’t mention it, but Rosenthal is now over 90 and apparently still a working artist, God bless him.) The Transportation Department, “does not repair kinetic works of art,” according to a spokesperson, speaking as if this was a matter of wise policy. The Village Alliance, a business improvement district, cleans off graffiti from time to time but that’s all they’re willing to do.

In the meantime, the cube stays stuck in a moment it can’t get out of.

Open Air Art: Clearing my mind of expectations

I’ve been thinking a lot about open air art lately; especially the kind of art anyone can walk up to outdoors in a public place. I can trace my thought process back to early this month when I saw the crews in Central Park begin bringing in the steel bases for the upcoming Christo and Jean-Claude installation. In the weeks since then, I find myself thinking more and more about open air art and my feelings towards it.

When it is unfurled next month, the Gates will update our notions of grandiosity for which New York is well known. Over one million square feet of fabric will be used for banners along 23 miles of footpaths in Central Park. This will be open air art that people will walk through.

The installation is happening because Mayor Bloomburg encouraged the artists’ to resubmit the project for city approval, in spite of the fact that many years earlier the city decisively rejected it. Problems were worked out—it was unacceptable for 30,000 holes be dug in the park as first proposed.—and this time the permits were granted.

I first became aware of Christo some 25 years ago with Running Fence, an installation of 24 miles of fabric running through California’s Sonoma County. A friend of mine who was an environmental planner told me about preparing the studies on the potential environmental impacts of the Running Fence.

I didn’t go see the piece, although I was in northern California. Back then, I just couldn’t grasp it, and I think I was typical of a lot of people. It says something, all these years later, that Christo and Jean-Claude can now put an installation in Central Park, with little problem about people grasping their concepts as art and not simply a stunt.

Since Running Fence, they have surrounded islands in Florida in fabric, wrapped a bridge in Paris, and planted hundreds of big umbrellas on the coasts of California and Japan. Christo and Jean-Claude own the spiritual copyright to art that juxtoposes fabric and geography, and have showed they are the right artists, perhaps the only artists, who should be granted permission to use Central Park as their canvas. .

Generally, I have mixed emotions about supersized art pieces. I’ve seen some very big pieces in warehouse galleries and other places. A lot of it seems to me to be the artist’s attempt to take a concept and somehow make it consequential through a scale of grandeur. I have been thinking about this, and also about other issues pertaining to the meaning of art to me and the context of public art in open air settings.

I don’t know how I feel about the Gates installation yet, and I won’t know until I experience it for myself. I hope to keep an open mind and a check on my real feelings as this project unfolds. I may come to love it. Or I may feel otherwise. Right now, I am trying to clear my mind of any expectations.

Dunkin Donuts – Don’t Swallow the Aesthetic Degradation

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead baffles me most of the time--which is what I enjoy about it--but I got Zippy’s point last month in a strip about Dunkin' Donuts. Zippy commented on the “horrific orange and hot pink logo,” put a donut in his mouth, and, in the final panel, said, “I’ll eat th’ donut, but I don’t have to swallow th’ aesthetic degradation!”

While Starbucks’ exteriors tend to uphold or blend into neighborhood character, Dunkin' Donuts veer towards, as Zippy put it, the horrific. At least, that was my feeling when the new store appeared at the corner of 1st Avenue and 83rd Street last fall.

And, according to a January 16 article in the Times, the look of Yorkville's newest donut shop will be replicated throughout the city. Dunkin Donuts is planning a total of 200 shops in Manhattan. A spokesman stated that the company prefers corner locations “with good viewpoints” for pedestrians to see signs from a long way off.

The new Yorkville store is located on a typical block with a hodgepodge of businesses including a bodega, barber shop, pizza place, cabinet shop, and local bar. True to the Times article, Dunkin' Donuts was not satisfied with having a highly visible corner location. To maximize attention, a plastic, awning-type attachment was built along both street frontages, topped with an attention-grabbing take-out cup. The attachment is filled with lighting tubes so that the whole thing functions as an internally lit sign.

When Zippy identified Dunkin' Donuts’ “orange and hot pink” stripes as being a company logo, he was correct, since the company color scheme is advertised widely as a visual tie-in to the brand. The attachment is made of these logo colors, which means the entire structure functions primarily as signage and only secondarily as an awning. It is also designed to direct light down to the sidewalk, thereby putting the Dunkin' Donuts glow to the entire street corner--visible “from a long way off."

The Times articles reported that signage for the Dunkin' Donuts’ shops currently in the city were granted city permits. If this is the case, from what I was able to learn from the City's online resources, the Planning Department was not following the City's regulations in the case of the Yorkville outlet.

The zoning map indicates that the store is in the C1 district. In this district, corner buildings are never allowed to have more than 50 square feet of illuminated signage for each street. I don’t know the actual measurements of the illuminated sign attachment, but my guess is that the square-footage is more-or-less 75 square feet facing 1st Ave and 125 square feet on 83rd St. This would mean Dunkin Donuts’ exceeds the illuminated signage code on 1st Ave. by perhaps as much as 50 percent, and on 83rd St. by as much as 150 percent.

One of the critical factors about street signage is that its effectiveness is primarily an issue of relativity: smaller signs can work well for a business if the surrounding signs are of a similar size and placement. In places where large signs tend to dominate, smaller signs won’t do the job anymore. As long as everyone follows the same rules, everyone has a better opportunity to be noticed.

The city’s zoning code regulates the size and placement of signs with the idea that less can accomplish more. It seemed clear to me that the code was designed to help preserve New York’s visual ambience from overreaching advertisements. Dunkin' Donuts might want signage that is visible from a long way off–so do a lot of businesses—but New York can stick with Zippy the Pinhead on this one and refuse to swallow the aesthetic degradation.

Starbucks—The Darwinistic “Third Place”

Had I been visiting my local Starbucks lately, I might’ve had the scoop on the fact that it is the first Starbucks to provide home delivery service. Instead, I read about it under theTimes headline, “A Marriage of New York Obsessions: Starbucks and ‘Do You Deliver?’”

My local Starbucks is on 85th St. at 1st Ave. Its delivery range is three blocks, which includes our co-op apartment. Dianne and are planning to have some friends over later this month, and we’ve decided to try out the delivery service then.

I’m a coffee drinker. I like Starbucks coffee but don’t usually head to Starbucks for hanging out. I do enjoy the patio at our local Starbucks from time to time, but indoors it feels too corporate to me. For hanging out in Yorkville, I prefer the cozier atmospheres at Tal Bagels (86th at 1st), Rors Coffee and Tea House (85th at 2nd), or DTUT (2nd at 84th).

For the Times article, the general manager was not allowed to comment on the delivery service. The reporter was referred to a marketing manger, who was “unable to provide information.” Like I said, Starbucks has a real corporate feeling.

Earlier this week, Starbucksgossip (“somebody has to monitor America’s favorite drug dealer”) featured the home delivery story. It also featured other links under the heading, “Marketers refer to Starbucks and other coffee shops as the ‘third place’". This caught my eye, because the term “third place” has been in the lexicon of urban planners for some time. It seems that the marketers have adopted the concept to explain certain community-oriented functions that have actually been around for centuries.

The term “third place” was coined by Ray Oldenburg in “The Great Good Place,” published in the pre-Starbucks era of 1991. Oldenburg wrote: “Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’ . . .The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.” (My emphasis.)

Coffeehouses have a grand tradition dating back to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries as relaxed, informal places for communities of people to hang out. (Online, I found this brief, fact-filled history). They were also favorite hangouts for many so-called counterculture types during their revival in the 1960’s; back then, my high school friends and I hung out at one named with ironic flair, “The Establishment.”

While Starbucks now markets itself as the “third place” for a new generation, it employed some undermining tactics to get to its present position. A lot of great coffeehouses went under due to the Starbucks phenomena, mere road kill in Starbucks’ aim to achieve market domination. That’s quite a shift in the paradigm of the community-based coffeehouse.

Back in the mid-nineties when Starbucks boom began, one coffeehouse owner who was feeling the pinch told me he understood that Starbuck’s m.o. was to locate the first outlet in a town or city as closely as possible to the most successful existing coffeehouse, usually on the same block. I also remember a neighborhood weekly in the early 90s claimed Starbucks was known to be leasing out and subletting other storefronts to assure no new competition appeared, but that might have been just a rumor of the times. Nevertheless, one by one, countless wonderful “third place” type coffeehouses disappeared in the shadow of the new kid on the block. A victory for Darwinist economics, I suppose, if that’s any “psychological comfort.”

Now, having achieved market dominance with some 8,500 outlets, last fall Starbucks announced its goal for 30,000 stores worldwide. Perhaps not coincidently, when McDonald’s achieved 30,000 outlets several years ago it began experiencing new economic difficulties. It’s possible that 30,000 is the saturation point for world domination of a mega food service.

Using Oldenburg’s definition, does Starbucks qualify as a “third place”? I think clearly it does. However, while Starbucks coffee may be strong, its third place atmosphere is weaker than the flavorful atmospheres of many independently owned coffeehouses.

The great coffeehouses that I recall often had push-pin bulletin board, piles of newspapers, and quirky music, among other particulars. Of course, that model of coffeehouse still thrives, tucked away in many neighborhoods. But will they be able to withstand the pressure of Starbucks’ elevated Darwinistic goals?

While I think Starbucks qualifies as one of Oldenburg's third place, somehow the phrase “psychological comfort and support,” aren’t words I would choose to describe it. The walls of a Starbucks are bare of any announcements of upcoming community events. The music is selected to brand certain highwater American artists with the Starbucks name. (The late Ray Charles is the current Starbucks favorite.) Of course, no freebie newspapers are to be found, nor am I likely to even find a daily paper for sale, except the New York Times. Come to think of it, every Starbucks, in or out of the New York, seems to sell the Times exclusively. It appears to be a corporate arrangement. Say—wasn’t it in the Times that I read the article about "New York’s obsession with Starbucks" in the first place?

A Slice of the City – Pedestrian Thoughts

From the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, I look straight down 82nd Street to the East River. A slice of the city is laid out before me. It surrounds me here at the steps of the Metropolitan, where people cluster to regroup and pause after experiencing the dizzying effects of the art of the ages inside the museum. It’s down there at the other end of 82nd, where there are benches lined up along the river’s edge where people watch the watery corridor of tugboats, barges, tourist ferries, and water taxis. It’s all along the way in between, in the outside space found between the two opposing walls of buildings, along its well-traveled corridor alive with pedestrians and vehicles.

On 82nd Street and its dissecting avenues are several shoe repair shops, where business is brisk in the manner that tire shops stay busy in most other towns. The average New Yorker doesn’t own a car and walks about five miles of city streets a day, far above the national average.

Like drivers in their cars, its worth remembering that pedestrians also have their destinations to get to. However, leg power, unlike fossil fuels, must come from our direct human physical effort. And the more engaging and interesting that the passing people, places, and things are that we see, the less concerned we become with the shear effort it takes to walk to our destination.

In urban planning, the field in which I work, traffic planners continuously study and model all matter of vehicle flows, hoping to accurately predict the impact of new development for designing the community infrastructure upgrades that will carry the new load. The phenomena of vehicular traffic flows, as the traffic planners understand it, is similar to that of water always seeking a level of equilibrium.

Putting their observation in more personal terms, it means, as a driver I tend to be focused on seeking and positioning myself in that equilibrium. The act of driving is inconsistent with any distractions that hinder my goal to reach my destination.

Consequently, put me a vast field of asphalt at a large suburban shopping center, and I just might drive the short distance to the store located more than a 5-minute walk away. However, fill that barren parking lot with a grid of urbanism and I’ll likely choose to walk the distance. Therein is the difference between the internal driver and the internal pedestrian within me: as driver I must avoid distractions at hand, while as pedestrian I will seek out to observe and, on occasion, interact with the minute particulars of passing street life.

In New York, when I ride the bus or subway I still remain in my pedestrian mode, a pedestrian riding among fellow pedestrians on the public wheels. City life is felt and experienced as we go from place to place, whether on foot or public transportation.

However, when I’m walking down the street with a cell phone to my ear, hearing a voice nobody else can hear, I feel more like I’m in driver mode: destination oriented, my multi-tasked operation with my communication machine saps what’s left of my attention span. I’m focused on avoiding run-ins with other pedestrians and crossing traffic, blocking out the rest of it around me, missing slices of the city that differentiates being here from anywhere else.

Stay Busy or Die

Today we’ve arrived at the second half of the millenium's first decade. As good as any day for me to begin View from Yorkville, a blog on topics based on my “characteristic preoccupations”, to borrow Marilynne Robinson’s phrase.

Professionally, I'm an urban planner. I am 53, born in Mineola, New York and currently live in Yorkville. “Where’s Yorkville?” you say.

Yorkville is one of New York City’s smallest neighborhoods, five avenue-blocks running from Lexington east to East End between 77th and 86th Streets. It's one of Manhattan’s oldest neighborhoods, founded in the 1840s by German, Czech, and Hungarian immigrants. Unlike the more famous or hipper neighborhoods of Manhattan, Yorkville generates so little attention, locals will still take notice when fleeting reference is found in the press.

Take this morning, for example. Dianne and I were lounging around, soaking up the first half of the Sunday Times that’s delivered on Saturday mornings. This was after a long New Year’s Eve that found us bringing in the new year in an East Village club called Tribe.

“Oh look, there’s Yorkville,” Dianne said while deep in the Business section. I was in the shallow end of the Times bath, reading about how handsome actors don't win Oscars.

Dianne was reading a business profile of Sidney Frank, a liquor importer who recently sold a brand of vodka for $2 billion. “Just call me Sid. Everyone else does,” the article opens up with, to tell us Sid is eminently approachable as a subject for a Times business profile.

Sid was a new widower and 53 when he aquired his first distributorship, which took off in sales several years later. According to the Times, “He had discovered the product, Jagermeister, an odd-tasting liqueur from Gernmany, in the lean years, on his strolls through Yorkville, New York’s old German neighborhood.”

Sid is 85 now, and intent on distributing his astonishing new wealth to the people, places and causes dear to him, but he has no plans to quit working. “I believe in the old saying, ‘Stay busy or die,” he says. “Besides, I’m having too much fun.”

These days the “old German” part of Yorkville lives on primarily at two venerable businesses on 2nd Avenue, the Heidelberg Café, the only German restaurant left in New York City, and Schaller & Webber, the deli where it's possible Sid saw his first bottles of Jagermeister which led to him making his $2 billion sale last year.

Sid looks like he’ll be one of the truly lucky ones, finishing up the full course of a marathon lifetime when it's his time, loving every step along the way. While Yorkville was the reference that pulled me into the article, what I left with was the old saying.

Stay busy or die.

Thank you, Sid, for passing that on as another new year begins.