Art Exhibits

A quite wonderful thing is happening on the High Line in section two: the birds are really flocking to Sarah Sze’s sculpture.

But they’re shy, at least during the daytime when thousands of people are passing by, sticking camera lenses into their little wooden houses and offering good, old-fashioned New York City food critiques of their bird seed. However, once you approach the exhibit you start hearing this chorus of chirping, and if you look around in the grass and stone mulch you can see them hopping around. I caught this mourning dove today, but there were lots of sparrows too, as well as butterflies who were enjoying the fruit that has been left for them.

I marvel that there’s this habitat just outside my window and am reminded, again, at what “Keep it wild” really means.

My friend Tom says “don’t be a hater” (he has teenagers) and normally I agree but I can’t play Pollyanna any longer. I have to say it: I hate the “talking” water fountains on the High Line. The first time I bent over to take a sip of water I practically smashed my camera when the fountain barked back at me. If it quoted Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (“I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony…”) I might feel differently but this stuff is ridiculous. Honestly, what is this all about? Hydration? Really? I hope no one with a heart condition gets thirsty on the High Line.

I can’t remember a time I was critical of the High Line. Maybe I thought my encomiastic posts would last forever; that is was impossible — or at least really, really hard — to find fault with a place where they manage, day in and day out, season after season, section after section, to get things right. But we lost Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell For Every Minute” and this is all we get in return?

I’m bringing a water bottle from now on. And I’m dreaming of winter when it’s so cold that the audio track freezes. Or the whole frackin’ fountain is just shut down. “Condemning shadows quite.”

 

I went to a wedding yesterday that was held in a field just a few miles from the Ashokan reservoir. The gentleman who officiated spoke of the Ashokan  — the deepest of several upstate reservoirs that provide water to New York City — as a metaphor for the reserves that each of us needs in a marriage. It’s the source we can always turn to, if we’re lucky to know that it’s there.

Of course I thought of the two bells from the Ashokan Center, a place dedicated to teaching about nature, history, farming and the arts in the Catskills, that ring every day on the High Line in Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell For Every Minute” exhibit. The first bell rings at eleven minutes past the hour and it’s a sleigh bell. The second is the dinner bell, and it rings at thirty-nine past.

Tomorrow Vitiello’s exhibit goes silent. It’s been a great gift to visitors on the High Line, an audio map of sounds from all over New York City and slightly beyond. All that’s left to say is thanks to this artist for his wonderful sound track, and to the Friends of the High Line for making a home for it this past year.

I’m sad that Vitiello’s exhibit is coming down — for me it has been a defining part of the High Line experience — but there are a million sounds to hear in the big city and what this exhibit did was remind us to listen. There’s no more artistic narrative — 59 bells every hour, with a chorus at the end — just the noisy cacophony of this great city.

To learn more about Stephen Vitiello, visit his website here. Or check out his sound cloud here.

It’s every dog’s dream to visit the High Line. Some people — and I love this about New York — are just undeterred. My dog Bucky weighs 55 pounds so there’s no way I’m going to stuff him underneath my suit jacket for an afternoon of flâneur. But these bold High Line visitors were not going to deny their best friend a view of Manhattan from thirty feet up. (For more dogs, see here.)

I say bravo. If a jazz band can storm the plantings for a photo opp and Barbie can pose in a piece of sculpture (by a MacArthur Genius Award winner, no less) then a couple of small dogs is hardly worth mentioning. But I couldn’t resist.

 

 

Readers of this blog know that I have been mourning the impending loss of Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell For Every Minute” exhibit, which comes down on June 20th.  But you can be consoled by a very cool exhibit in the new section of the park — at around 21st Street — by the artist Sarah Sze. There’s a way in which this is a “living” exhibit: there are trays with seeds to attract birds and orange and apple slices to attract butterflies. And the little bird houses in the sky make a nice contrast to the sturdy human abodes that you can see in the distance, through the exhibit — the stately water towers of the Lincoln Towers apartment building and the Empire State Building.

I caught this fella, a house wren, early this morning. If you were a bird, isn’t this where you’d want to be?

 

Today is the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season, and this afternoon New York City was under a tornado watch. This made me think about a story I read about the Frying Pan lightship that’s docked at Pier 66a just a few blocks from my home and in view (I think, but won’t know for sure until next week when section 2 opens) of the High Line.

The Frying Pan was stationed at Frying Pan Shoals, 30 miles off Cape Fear in North Carolina. The boat, a lightship, was designed to be a floating lighthouse that would guard other ships and help them avoid running aground on shoals or submerged rocks. On the Frying Pan’s website you can read an account by a former captain of how the anemometer was literally blown away by Hurricane Donna. The boat and crew withstood 50 foot waves and a roll of 70 degrees. Someone else on the website describes life on the Frying Pan — which was launched just a few years before the elevated railroad we know today as the High Line opened for business — as “filled with months of boredom followed by minutes of pure fear.”

For a short time — until June 20th — you can hear the Pier 66 Maritime bell at 31 minutes past the hour, every hour, in the 14th Street Passage of the High Line. It’s part of Stephen Vitiello’s wonderful “A Bell for Every Minute” exhibit which I am so sad to remind you will close later this month. Get there a bit early and you can hear the bell of the noble John J. Harvey, a retired NYFD fireboat that steamed down to lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, to try to help put out the fires at the World Trade Center; the Harvey assisted the NYFD in evacuations and then returned to pump water from the Hudson River because the water mains downtown had been damaged by the terrorist attacks. That boat has a stately history too, which you can read about at fireboat.org.

So much New York-ness, present and historical, to be heard in Vitiello’s exhibit. Get there while you can; once it comes down it’ll be gone for good and won’t exist in any form on the web. The pdf of Vitiello’s “sound map” is here and won’t go away, but it’s silent. The bells are glorious. I wish they would become a permanent part of the High Line.

I’m trying not to be obsessive about this, but I have a feeling that many people will look back on the early days of the High Line when the bells rang, minute by minute, and remember that these were the glory days. Or, as Aretha Franklin might say, “the good old days, the good old days.”

I started this post at 7:46, consulted Stephen Vitiello’s “sound map” and discovered that at this moment the bells of Kettles & Co. are sounding.

I didn’t know what this meant so I Googled them and came here, to a website that explains that Kettles & Co. is “New York City’s leading percussion, timpani and celesta global rental service.” This company rents out instruments that I couldn’t possibly describe — “3 octaves of almglocken,” “5-octave Schiedmayer Celestas, Estey Harmonium, Jenco Keyboard Glockenspiel, Pedal Glockenspiel, Bass Chimes for Mahler, Shostakovich and Berlioz,” and many others with equally inscrutable names. On the company’s website you can watch YouTube videos of orchestras using Kettle & Co. instruments.

When I began this post — now ten minutes ago — a “Swiss cowbell” was ringing.

Where else are you going to find this????

The High Line is set to open its new section next month and the blogosphere is clanging. (See 0:54: New York Transit Museum, subway bell.) But no one is talking about what we will lose in the process.

You have six weeks to enjoy “A Bell For Every Minute.” It’s hard to imagine that the good people who run the High Line can come up with anything even close to this remarkably wonderful exhibit.

Go now. It’s 8:10. The bell of Gracie Mansion’s historic clock is ringing.

 

 

It’s 5:03: time for the Coney Island Dreamland bell…

Stephen Vitiello’s wonderful exhibit, “A Bell For Every Minute,” goes silent on June 20th.  For me the The Bells has always been a central, defining part of the High Line. Every walk I’ve taken has had the accompaniment of New York’s orchestra of sounds, courtesy of Vitiello. So get there while you can and enjoy it; next month it ends for good.

The artist was kind enough to share with readers of LivinTheHighLine.com his “sound map” for “The Bells of New York.” You can download the pdf here. It lists each bell by name and minute and includes a rough map of New York to indicate the place where the original bell is located.

And now it’s 5:32: not only are the Delacorte Park bells ringing but the animals are spinning ’round the clock, playing their instruments for all the kids to see. Of course the city’s sounds will always be here to enjoy, just not on a schedule that has been organized by an artist.