Christo and Jeanne-Claude    
  The Gates, Central Park, NYC AboutMaterialsPhotosLinks  
       
 

Installation

On January 3, 2005, work began on the installation of the project.

During the week of January 17th, the park was filled with workers using fork lift vehicles to move the rectangular metal plates into position all over central park.

There were small signs placed on every walkway in the park with alphanumeric codes which the workers were using to place the metal places onto the designated spots.

As of January 27, most of the rectangular metal plates had been placed in their positions. Many had small orange plastic markers sticking up a foot or two (around half of meter) from each end, possibly intended to help people find the base plates if they were covered with snow. The snow (there was a major snow storm on January 22nd) and extreme cold hampered progress in late January.

As of February 7, there were many teams of workers wearing silver grey smocks moving the vertical parts of the gates, and attaching them to the base plates. The documentation describes the color as "saffron" but local observers would describe it as orange. Here is the hardware being used to make the vertical pieces parallel, even when the base plates are not parallel (due to uneven or sloping ground).

When attached, the vertical pieces are about 6 meters high, with a cross bar at the top from which the flag piece will be unfurled. The most common width seems to be 11 feet (3.35 meters) although they vary considerably (depending on the width of the path) from around 6 feet (2 meters) to over 20 feet (6 meters)

 

 
 

Opening

The project was officially launched on February 12, 2005, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped the first piece of fabric at 8:30 AM, with Christo and Jean Claude in attendance.

The rest of The Gates were opened over the course of the next few hours, with large crowds of people watching. Generally, the crews of people who erected the gates were assigned to open them. They simply had to walk underneath, and use a hook at the end of a long stick to pull a loop hanging from the cross bar of each gate. That opened the cloth bag which contained the "flag" part of the gate. The bag fell to the ground, along with a card board tube around which the flag was rolled. The flag part then hung majestically from the cross bar.

As of February 13, all of The Gates have been opened. The project staff is still deployed in the park, patrolling, and replacing a few of The Gates that have become damaged. There are many more people then usual walking around in the park, looking and photographing The Gates.