NEW YORK | Museums - expansions

[NYguy]

NY Magazine

Queens Latest Borough to Get New Museum; Staten Islanders Forgotten?

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A rendering of the Queens Museum of Art's new east façade.


Like so many city trends these days, it started in Brooklyn.

First, in April 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art unveiled its $63 million renovation, complete with a new 15,000-square-foot entrance pavilion. Seven months later came — did you hear about this little thing? — Manhattan's new MoMA, built at a cost of $858 million. And last week the Bronx Museum of the Arts unveiled a hipper façade and addition, by the Miami architects Arquitectonica. (Nicolai Ouroussoff called it "unpretentious," which is so very outer borough). Now, not to be left out, the Queens Museum of Art has announced its own $37 million expansion plan, which includes doubling the size of the museum, building an Olympic-size indoor pool, and adding an ice-skating rink with seating for 400. (It may sound more fun than it looks; the Sun called the new design "a drab gray structure.")

Which all adds up to one question: What about art lovers in the city's so-often-forgotten borough, Staten Island? Don't they deserve a little newness too?

Turns out the city's only "general interest" museum has been quietly planning its own expansion — since the eighties. Plans were made, then budgets were slashed, and nothing ever got off the ground. But now it's finally happening. Buoyed by extra capital and support from the Bloomberg administration, a plan is moving forward to renovate and restore two landmarked Greek Revival buildings in the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. The museum is located nearby, close to the ferry terminal; the move is expected in 2009 or 2010.

So do the Staten Islanders feel jealous of all this attention on other boroughs' museums? "Um, I don't think there's so much of a competition," says Henryk Behnke, the Staten Island Museum's marketing and development veep, after a long pause. "We're just in the early stages. We want to make the unveiling in a year and a half. It has to be timed very well. Hopefully, we'll have the mayor here." Hope away, guys. We bet Brooklyn was able to get the mayor.

— Melena Ryzik

[NYguy]

Daily News

Plans to double size of Queens Museum of Art

BY DONALD BERTRAND


The Queens Museum of Art has unveiled new architectural designs for an expanded museum, which officials hope will be better received than plans that were proposed four years ago.

The new plans call for the size of the museum - now located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park that served as the New York City Building in the 1939 World's Fair - to double.

The latest design calls for an ice rink that now occupies the southern half of the building to move into a $55.2 million facility being built in the park. That new facility would include an Olympic-sized indoor pool and a National Hockey League-size skating rink with seating for 400.

In 2002, a group of preservationists and architectural historians lambasted the original design, with one calling it the "London Blitz design, because it looks like the building was bombed in the London Blitz."

Museum Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl said the new design will bring more light into the building and make it more inviting.

Finkelpearl conceded that the museum's exterior makes it look like "a worn-out, rundown kind of place," and said he gets frustrated when one visitor after another tells him: "This place is much better than I thought."

"We want people to say, 'This is just as good as I thought,'" he said. "The exterior of the building should be as good as the interior."

If all goes according to plan, the final ice rink season in New York City Building would be next spring, with expansion construction following. The expansion is to be finished in January 2010.

The expansion project will cost about $37 million. So far, $33 million in funding has been allocated, with some $21 million of it coming from Queens Borough President Helen Marshall's office.

Mayor Bloomberg's office provided an additional $7 million in funding, and the City Council $4.6 million.

[NYguy]

NY Times

Art to the People, and Vice Versa, in the Bronx

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A new look: The just-completed addition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts includes a pleated facade of aluminum.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
October 6, 2006

The way I see it, Arquitectonica has owed New York a decent building. That firm built its reputation with a series of projects in its hometown, Miami, that mixed bold forms and alluring surfaces at bargain prices. But in New York it has produced only clunkers. Its Westin Hotel tower on Eighth Avenue defines cheapness: a collage of gaudy colors with a long, illuminated arc scratched across its facade. And the muted plaid pattern that it used to decorate the first of a group of towers currently under construction in Long Island City, Queens, is not an improvement.

But with the completion of the addition to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, all is forgiven. With its pleated aluminum facade and refreshingly unpretentious interiors, the addition is a reminder of how architecture can have a profound public impact when its values are in the right place. And it demonstrates how simple it can be to bridge the divide between art and its audience at a time when much bigger, more high-profile museums and their ultra-rich boards can seem baffled by their cultural roles.

The addition is the centerpiece of a string of building projects that promise to shore up the Bronx’s dicey image as well as help reassert its former identity as a haven for the middle class. Bulldozers have already begun clearing the site for the new Yankee Stadium a few blocks away, a bold new criminal courts complex designed by Rafael Viñoly is nearing completion just down the street, and the Grand Concourse is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar face-lift.

Of these sites the museum is the most steeped in the Bronx’s turbulent social history. Founded in 1971, when the Bronx was still substantially white and middle class, it first made its home in the streamlined Moderne rotunda of the 1930’s-era county building. Curators joke that its audience was mostly defendants being dragged to court, conjuring the image of an art therapy class rather than a serious museum.

The story is only half true, but it hints at the museum’s struggle to form an identity in a borough that was undergoing dramatic social changes. In 1982 the museum moved to its current location, a former synagogue at the corner of Grand Concourse and 165th Street that had been abandoned by its congregation as the neighborhood became increasingly Latino. An awkward 1988 renovation by Castro-Blanco Piscioneri & Associates provided a more formal entry, but its corner lobby and cramped balconies had the feel of a suburban mall.

Arquitectonica’s new addition slips into this messy context with surprising ease. In keeping with their populist agenda, the firm’s principals, Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear, don’t try to hide the building’s low-budget construction. Instead, the main facade is conceived as an enormous folding screen, its glistening aluminum surface draped over the building’s crude concrete block structure.

The facade gives the building a wonderful lightness. And it brings to mind an updated version of the streamlined Art Deco designs of 1920’s architects like the Los Angeles firm of Morgan, Walls & Clements, which created a populist architecture for the emerging car culture. As in those earlier designs, the glistening vertical folds of Arquitectonica’s facade act as a visual counterpoint both to the horizontal movement of the cars streaming by on the concourse and to the heavy brick buildings that flank the museum.

But the playful exterior forms also reflect a wonderfully nuanced interplay between the inner life of the museum and the public world outside. The vertical bands of windows are set deep inside the facade’s creases, so that from directly across the street you barely notice them. As you approach the museum along the sidewalk, however, you catch diagonal views into the lobby, luring you inside.

That bond — between art and public — continues right up through the building. A single column anchors the vertical lobby, accentuating its height, while a long ramp at the back of the space feeds into a new 2,500-square-foot gallery at the back of the building and the old galleries off to the right.

The creased facade is even more effective from inside. The tall, angled windows offer picturesque views of pedestrians strolling up and down the boulevard. As you step deeper into the building those views disappear, which helps refocus your attention onto the art.

A warning: Don’t expect anything fancy here. The main gallery is a simple white box with raw concrete floors. The standard steel railings and light fixtures have a straightforward institutional quality. And although the old galleries have been given a slick new paint job, they are just as utilitarian. But this only serves to make the museum feel more open and accessible. It reinforces the sense of public ownership that is so crucial to a museum’s success.

It also seems to have liberated the curators, who appear to have eagerly responded to the building’s populist theme. The addition opens with “Tropicália,” a show about the period of experimental Brazilian art that began in the late 1960’s, and the artwork spills into every corner of the museum. A mural commissioned for the opening, by the collaborative group Assume Vivid Astro Focus, covers the back of the lobby in a swirl of Day-Glo. Sculptures by Rodrigo Araújo and Marepe are scattered across the lobby floor, where they will be visible from the street.

The museum’s ambitions don’t end here. Fund-raising has yet to begin for a second phase of construction that would expand the museum to the south, replacing the old 1988 Castro-Blanco building with new galleries, a performing arts space and a residential tower. The proposal, also designed by Arquitectonica, would erase some of the nice historical tensions embodied in the current museum, but it would give the institution a much-needed coherence, something that it richly deserves. And revenue from the residential tower could provide some financial stability for one of the city’s most underappreciated art institutions.

But for the time being, the new addition proves what can be accomplished with few resources and a lot of heart. It is a reminder that not all museum expansions are driven by media-savvy self-promoters, that the big, bad corporate machine has not yet penetrated every corner of the culture world. Increasingly in today’s New York, the most humble projects are the most moving.

[NYguy]

NY Times

Whitney Museum May Move Expansion to Downtown Site

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By ROBIN POGREBIN
October 31, 2006
Correction Appended

The Whitney Museum of American Art, after fighting for more than a year to have an addition to its Madison Avenue building approved, has all but decided that moving its expansion to another site would make more sense, people involved in the process say.

The museum won its struggle to have the city approve a tower designed by the architect Renzo Piano. But after weighing the pros and cons, those familiar with the process say, the Whitney has determined that the Piano project may not get the museum sufficient additional space for the money.

The museum has instead set its sights on a location downtown at the entrance to the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is to become a landscaped esplanade. The Dia Art Foundation announced last week that it no longer planned to build a museum there.

This marks a striking turn of events for the Whitney, since the museum has tried for 20 years to add onto its 1966 Marcel Breuer building. In July the museum finally completed the public approvals process and was allowed to go forward.

Leonard A. Lauder, the Whitney’s chairman, declined to be interviewed. “Our responsibility is to ensure the long term programmatic and financial health of the Whitney,” said Jan Rothschild, a museum spokeswoman. “It would be easy to forge ahead with the expansion on Madison Avenue. We have received the necessary approvals from the city, and our fund-raising is going extremely well, but we want to make sure it is the best option for the program and collection of the museum before moving forward.”

Board members are reluctant to discuss the High Line possibility, out of concern about offending the political officials whose support they will need to secure the site, those involved in the project say. Others spoke on condition of anonymity because the board had yet to vote on abandoning the Piano plan.

The board members are coming off a bruising battle with Upper East Side residents and preservationists over the Piano addition. The architect produced many drafts of his design for the tower, which would have been in a designated historic district, after the Landmarks Commission insisted that he halve the width of a new Madison Avenue entrance to preserve a historic brownstone.

In pricing out the cost of building a nine-story tower behind a row of historic brownstones, which would connect to the Breuer building through a series of glass bridges, the Whitney realized that the addition would add 16,000 to 20,000 square feet of exhibition space, when it had wanted 30,000.

Construction costs have skyrocketed since the museum started planning for Mr. Piano’s addition, now estimated at $200 million, which — with an endowment drive — would bring the fund-raising goal to $500 million. The excavation would have to be done from behind the brownstones, an expensive and logistically challenging proposition. By contrast, the excavation involved in renovating the Morgan Library and Museum — also designed by Mr. Piano — was done from within the library’s property.

Building at the downtown site would allow the Whitney to keep operating at its uptown location throughout the construction. To build the Piano addition, it would have been forced to close for two years, losing its presence at precisely the time that the New Museum of Contemporary Art was reopening in its new building on the Bowery.

The museum could sell the historic brownstones and use the proceeds toward constructing a building downtown. And the city might contribute funds for a downtown Whitney because it owns the site and has an interest in anchoring the High Line with a cultural attraction. The city had committed $8 million to the Dia project.

Dia had envisioned a two-story structure with 45,000 square feet of gallery space over two floors at a cost of $55 million, although the Whitney is expected to build something very different if it goes there.

Many arts professionals in the city are asking why the Whitney is considering other options after spending so much time, effort and money fighting for the Piano expansion.

This is not the first time the Whitney’s expansion plans have foundered. The board scrapped a $37 million design by Michael Graves in 1985 and a $200 million design by Rem Koolhaas in 2003.

Its institutional reputation too has encountered rough spots. Adam D. Weinberg was hired as the Whitney’s director in 2003, the third in six years. Two museum board members resigned in the aftermath of controversy, including L. Dennis Kozlowski, who was convicted of looting Tyco of $150 million, and Jean-Marie Messier, who resigned as chief executive of Vivendi Universal because of the company’s poor performance.

Other museums in Manhattan, meanwhile, have been in the spotlight with successful expansions, like the Museum of Modern Art’s new $858 million building and the New Museum’s current $50 million construction project.

If expansion is a way for the Whitney to reinvent itself and remain competitive, this recent turnaround, viewed in another light, could be seen as realistic and responsible.

As museums across the country build additions by celebrity architects, many are now struggling with the larger operating budgets that accompany expansion. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, for example, recently decided against excavating under its garden courtyard to create new space and will instead pursue a more modest expansion.

Speaking of the Whitney, Kate D. Levin, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, said, “It is highly responsible to take stock of whether this is the right step for them, given what they found out about what the building would look like and what it would cost.” At the High Line site, at 820 Washington Street, at Gansevoort Street, the Whitney could establish the downtown outpost that many in the art world have long said the museum should have, a hip, more youthful presence suitable to its mission as the artists’ museum.

Now the Upper East Siders who vehemently opposed the expansion in their neighborhood are celebrating. In an e-mail message last week to fellow members of the Coalition of Concerned Whitney Neighbors, Edward Klimerman wrote, “Hope springs eternal.”


Correction: Nov. 1, 2006

An article in The Arts yesterday about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s pursuit of an alternative to the expansion of its Madison Avenue building referred imprecisely to the logistics behind the Morgan Library’s recent expansion. Construction excavation was carried out within the library’s property; it was not done from the street.

[shadowbat]

That old OMA rendering looks like a scorpian ready to attack.

[NYguy]

That old OMA rendering looks like a scorpian ready to attack.

Maybe they'll go back to something like that at the new location...(Newsweek)

Uptown Downtown Runaround
Renzo Piano was hired to design an addition to New York’s Whitney Museum—but scratch that, now he’s drawing up plans for a satellite museum downtown. Either way, he’s happy.

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Renzo Piano in the atrium of New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, which he recently redesigned.
By Cathleen McGuigan
Newsweek

Nov. 2, 2006 - While museums around the country have been opening glamorous additions by star architects, the Whitney Museum of American Art can’t seem to get its act together. In 1985, the museum shelved a high-profile scheme by Michael Graves (the guy most famous today for creating products for Target) to expand its Marcel Breuer-designed museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Then in 2003, the trustees cancelled plans for a much-ballyhooed addition by the avant-garde Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (his design was so over the top it was never actually unveiled). So it was a little shocking when word leaked out that the museum may well back out of a third plan for an addition—this one by the brilliant Italian Renzo Piano, whose scheme called for a quietly elegant nine-story tower to join the brooding granite Breuer building via glass bridges.

The Whitney had spent more than a year defending the Piano design against neighborhood opposition and finally won zoning approval from the city last summer—though some of the museum’s neighbors then filed a lawsuit to try to block the project.

A Whitney spokeswoman confirms the museum is now looking into constructing a satellite building in Manhattan’s ultracool downtown meatpacking district rather than expanding on its current tight site, though a final decision hasn’t been taken by the board of trustees. And here’s the good news: this time the Whitney isn’t dumping their architect but inviting him to create the design for a new site.

NEWSWEEK’s architecture critic Cathleen McGuigan spoke with Piano about what it’s like to go back to the drawing board.

________________________________________________________


NEWSWEEK: How did you find out the Whitney may not build your current design after all the approvals were won?

Renzo Piano: A short time ago, in September, I was asked, how do you feel about moving, going somewhere else? So then I went to the possible new site—and this is a beautiful piece of land, down by the meat market, a big open space—between the High Line [an abandoned elevated rail track that is being converted into a parklike esplanade] and the Hudson River. It’s big enough to make something very different, very generous. I like that place, including the meat smell! It’s full of energy. Of course, my first reaction was sad, when you spend a couple years struggling, and dreaming, about a scheme, and finally you may end by not doing it.

But you were immediately asked to design a new building?

Yes, yes, that was absolutely clear. Everybody, actually, asked me. I found that very nice, the fact they said that part of the possibility of this depends on your availability to be the architect.

What’s the reasoning behind considering another site? Is it about escalating costs to build on that difficult site uptown?

The truth is that, a couple months ago, somebody started to wonder about staying there because, fundamentally we got the permission, but now a group is making legal action again. The atmosphere is so basically hostile, it is like growing flowers in bad earth. It’s incredible. Everybody started to wonder about this atmosphere.

[NYguy]

NY Times

Whitney’s Expansion Plans Are Shifting South, to the Meatpacking District

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Whitney Museum is planning a branch at the High Line park


By CAROL VOGEL
November 28, 2006

A month after the Dia Art Foundation scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, the abandoned elevated railway line that the city is transforming into a public park, the Whitney Museum of American Art has signed on to take its place and build a satellite institution of its own downtown.

The Whitney recently reached a conditional agreement on Wednesday night with the city’s Economic Development Corporation to buy the city-owned site, at Gansevoort and Washington streets, officials at the museum said yesterday. Plans call for the new museum to be at least twice the size of the Whitney’s home on Madison Avenue at 75th Street, they said, and to be finished within the next five years.

The deal, which has still to go through a public review process before it is final, puts an end to the Whitney’s plan to for a nine-story addition by the architect Renzo Piano that would connect to the museum’s original 1966 Marcel Breuer building via a series of glass bridges. It will be the third time in 11 years that the museum has commissioned a celebrity architect to design a major expansion to its landmark building, only to pull out.

“This is a more prudent step to take,” Leonard A. Lauder, chairman of the Whitney’s board, said by telephone yesterday. “Yet it is an adventurous step. We think the new site will have a big enough impact so that it will become a destination.”

The museum’s director, Adam D. Weinberg, said the new museum would not only offer more gallery space but would also be less expensive. “We know it will be cheaper per square foot than uptown, but we don’t know what it will cost,” he said. (The uptown expansion was expected to cost more than $200 million.) Mr. Piano has agreed to design the new museum. Although no architectural plans have been drawn up, the future museum is loosely estimated to afford at least 200,000 square feet.

Kate D. Levin, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, called the agreement “a wonderful moment” but cautioned, “It is a preliminary moment.” If all goes as planned, she said, “it will let a museum grow and flourish” as well as provide an anchor to the city’s High Line project.

In addition to attracting a broader audience, having a site downtown will allow the museum space to build larger galleries without the constraints of building in a historic district. Sweeping galleries are generally needed to show much of the latest art being produced today.

Compared with around 65,000 square feet of gallery space in the uptown Piano addition, the High Line site will have about 100,000 to 150,000 square feet of gallery space, Mr. Weinberg said. The current Breuer building has some 30,000 square feet.

Mr. Lauder said: “The key word here is footprint. We will be able to stage shows horizontally rather than vertically.” Previous uptown expansions jettisoned by the Whitney include a $37 million addition by Michael Graves canceled in 1985 and a $200 million design by Rem Koolhaas scrapped in 2003.

Mr. Piano’s project met with heated opposition from preservationists who objected to the elimination of brownstone facades on Madison Avenue, part of the Upper East Side Historic District. After the Whitney agreed to maintain that facade, the project was approved in July by the city’s Board of Standards.

In addition to a second site the Whitney is also planning to upgrade the Breuer building significantly, with improvements like new, double-glazed windows and a better climate control system, Mr. Lauder said.

“The Breuer building is now 40 years old, and a lot of technology has happened since it was built,” Mr. Lauder said. “It is our iconic building, and we are planning to put a lot of money into it.” While he said it was too early to say just how much “a lot” is, he estimated the cost of refurbishing the building at $20 million to $40 million.

While taking note of the creation of dual-site museums like the Tate in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Mr. Weinberg said the Whitney was hoping to invent a model of its own. “We are envisioning both sites will show contemporary and historic art,” he said.

The Whitney will continue to devote itself to American art, he said, but “it will be American art in the broadest sense seen within an international context.” In addition to providing room to spread out, he added, the downtown space will allow the museum to keep adding to its collection.

Mr. Weinberg said the museum intended to strengthen its performing arts, education and film programs, which will all be based downtown.

While Dia had planned to lease the downtown site from the city, the Whitney’s deal calls for buying 820 Washington Street and 555 West Street, abandoned shell structures adjacent to each another. The city will charge the Whitney roughly half the appraised value of the two buildings, said Jan Rothschild, a spokeswoman for the Whitney.

“We like the character and the grittiness of the neighborhood,” Mr. Weinberg said of the meatpacking district. “We want to keep the museum as low as possible.” Plans call for about 15,000 square feet of meat market space as well as offices for the High Line in the complex.

Rather than dwell on the death blow to the Piano addition, Whitney officials sought to portray the move as a homecoming of sorts. The institution, which began in Greenwich Village in 1918 as the Whitney Studio Club, became the Whitney Museum in 1931.

“We’re returning to our roots,” Mr. Weinberg said. “So much of the first half of our collection was made around 14th Street and below, and so many artists whose works we have live within a 20-block radius. We see this as reconnecting with the artists’ community.”

[NYguy]

Newsday

NYC history museum's expansion plan meets opposition

December 30, 2006

NEW YORK (AP) _ A history museum is looking to its future, and the plans are making some neighbors nervous.

The New-York Historical Society is proposing a $20 million renovation of its landmark museum and library on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The plan calls for a fifth story on the society's roof and a glass apartment tower behind it to help pay for the project.

The society got proposals from eight developers this month, and it has raised the potential expansion with the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. Changes to the building's exterior require the commission's approval.

"We do have a need to grow," said society President Louise Mirrer. She said the expansion would allow space to reorganize galleries and collections and would help the 202-year-old institution stay afloat financially.

But the plan is meeting opposition from neighbors, preservationists and at least one city council member. They say the glass tower wouldn't fit its venerable surroundings on Central Park West.

"For historic reasons, a glass tower is wrong," said Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the area. Mirrer said the glass tower was only "a place-holder." She added that the society would have a say in choosing the architect.

Some local residents also see the society's plan as a mark of an uninvited transformation.

"Our membership is concerned about the changing character of the West Side. People feel they are being steamrollered," said Joseph Bolanos, president of the West 76th Street Park Block Association. He said it had 100 members.

The city and state may be able to impose restrictions because they contributed more than $25 million to previous improvements.

"If it is not a necessary change, and it vitiates a taxpayer investment, we're not going to do it," said city Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin.

Mirrer pledged that the society would be "absolutely scrupulous" about keeping its commitments to the city.

The historical society maintains a collection of more than 60,000 objects and artworks, as well as 3 million books, photographs, prints and maps. Highlights include John James Audubon's watercolors for "Birds of America," according to the society's Web site.

Community opposition has stalled previous expansion plans, but not all neighbors are against the latest proposal. David Berkowitz, who owns a townhouse next to the vacant lot on West 76th Street where the tower would go, said it might make the street safer.


New-York Historical Society: https://www.nyhistory.org/

[NYguy]

slatin report

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Chelsea Arts Tower, designed by Kossar & Garry Architects, will open in January on West 25th Street.


NYC 11 06 06
THE ART OF THE ART DEALER DEAL

Beth ONeil

The developers of a glitzy new commercial gallery tower in Manhattan's gritty West Chelsea arts district say their building will help the district forestall the typical fate of edgy art-world neighborhoods. But chances are just as good that their creation could be a catalyst for pricing boho types out of this transplanted SoHo.

It’s a familiar story in once-emerging, art-driven neighborhoods. Retail rental rates move up as the residential and tourist base grows and becomes more affluent. Luxury retail chain tenants can afford the new order, while the leading-edge galleries and restaurants that helped create the draw in the first place are forced to close and migrate elsewhere. Sometimes, even those galleries that can afford to hang on relocate anyway. The mix of retailers and hordes of tourists and non-art shoppers obliterates the culturati ambience that provides an intellectual edginess and promotes a successful buzz in the airy spheres of high art. But the success of small, scrappy galleries that pay relatively low rents and can take chances on unproven talent is critical to the art world.

More than a decade ago, many galleries in SoHo, New York's legendary arts district began migrating north to West Chelsea, where the rents were affordable and there was ample, raw and gritty space in warehouses and industrial buildings; a new cultural milieu took root there in short order.

Now, the new twenty-story Chelsea Arts Tower is rising at 545 West 25th Street in the heart of what’s been dubbed “Gallery Row"; the neighborhood is home to approximately 300 small to medium-sized galleries. The tower's developers say that, for gallery owners, it offers a prophylactic solution to the cycle of neighborhood re-pricing that would inevitably force them to move yet again: Let the galleries buy their own space.

It was obvious, say the group that conceived Chelsea Arts Tower - developers Bass Associates and Young Woo & Associates along with brokers Stuart Siegel and Alan Weisman of Grubb & Ellis – that the demand from gallery owners was there. “We spent time in focus groups and ultimately determined that the market would support the building,” says Jack Guttman of Bass Associates. They have sold all but one floor, according to Siegel. Prices per square foot for one of these floors range from $650 to well over $1,000, he says.

Designed by architect Alan Garry of Kossar & Garry Architects with a lobby by renowned gallery and museum architect Richard Gluckman, Chelsea Arts Tower, which topped out earlier this year and is expected to receive its first tenants in January, is the tallest commercial building in West Chelsea, accordingt o Siegel. Open floor plates, designed specifically for gallery and artistic use, range from 3,100 to 4,700 square feet. Each floor has eleven-foot ceilings with full-height windows to allow for maximum light exposure. The concrete and glass building has three over-sized high-speed elevators (which will open horizontally), ideal for transporting contemporary mega-works. Along with the high ceilings, the builidng's minimal columns and reinforced walls are all geared to supporting and displaying oversized artwork.

The roster of blue chip dealers that have already staked their claim on space in the building is led off by Marlborough, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading contemporary art dealers, which will occupy 9,500 square feet on the first two floors of the building and is effectively the building's anchor. Marlborough, founded in 1946, will be keeping its flagship 57th Street gallery and closing one on 19th Street; it did not commit to the project until the end of 2005, well into construction. Tina Kim Fine Art, also currently located on 57th Street, has purchased the third floor, and Siegel says that a deal for a non-profit arts organization to buy the 15th floor should happen “any day.”

But the story takes an interesting twist: Fashion maven Calvin Klein has purchased the 18th floor for a reported $4 million for his new company office. Siegel claims “strong interest from other fashion entities as well.”

Is Chelsea Arts Tower a model for how gallery owners can halt the pernicious rent hikes that drive them to search for greener – or cheaper, funkier – pastures? John Cacciola owns the J. Cacciola Gallery, which was formerly located in SoHo and now sits 500 feet from the new tower. “A prestigious building coming in to house galleries is fine,” he acknowledges. “If I had the money, I would buy. They are certainly not giving it away.” Indeed, smaller galleries like Cacciola that currently rent in the neighborhood are not likely to be able to afford the tower. They hope the new model won’t drive up their rents.

The move to sell space to galleries isn't as pioneering as it might seem, say local real estate sources. The big galleries that arrived early In Chelsea made sure to buy their space rather than rent – they had learned their lesson from the SoHo experience. Already, there is a feeling in the local art scene that Chelsea will not suffer the same fate as SoHo, at least not to the same extent. Still, many galleries, large and small, are still renting, and rents are headed in only one direction for the foreseeable future.

Despite his trepidations, Cacciola also sees the benefits of the building and its ground floor tenant. “The foot traffic should be terrific for business," he says. "People will find galleries here they never knew existed.” Owen Gray, an established artist who’s long been showing his work at the Blue Mountain Gallery located on 25th Street, agreed with Cacciola. “It could attract people, but I think it will be a mixed blessing," he says. He also added that the building that previously occupied the site “was an eyesore among a row of beautiful brick buildings.”

Developer Young Woo of Young Woo & Associates says the project sprang from a similar sentiment. “We wanted the Chelsea Arts Tower to have the lighthouse effect. People can look up and say, ‘Hey, there’s the Chelsea Arts District.’ ”

Woo, Siegel and Guttman all say worries about West Chelsea becoming the next SoHo and losing its small-gallery population to rich retailers are unfounded. SoHo and West Chelsea are completely different real estate animals, they insist. “SoHo lends itself to retailers moving in. But you really have to make a point to get to West Chelsea,” Siegel says. “I’m not sure if retailers would be interested in moving to Chelsea because there isn’t as much traffic.” Woo adds that they don’t want to create another SoHo. “Galleries were buying. We listened. That’s the main difference from SoHo. We couldn’t build out, so we wanted to go up as high as we could to provide as much space as possible.”

http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/cattower.jpg

The building in construction.

[drew11]

i saw this one on emporis cool tower wish it was taller though. :)

[NYguy]

NY Times

MoMA to Gain Exhibition Space by Selling Adjacent Lot for $125 Million


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A view of the vacant lot MoMA is selling to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/03/arts/03muse_CA1.650.jpg

An aerial view of the vacant lot MoMA is selling.


By CAROL VOGEL
January 3, 2007

Capitalizing on Manhattan’s robust real estate prices, the Museum of Modern Art is selling its last vacant parcel of land in Midtown for $125 million to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston, the museum’s director said yesterday.

As part of the deal Hines is to construct a mixed-use building on West 54th Street that will connect to the museum’s second- , fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, said the director, Glenn D. Lowry. He said the project would afford about 50,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the Modern’s painting and sculpture collections.

A Hines spokesman said it was too early to say what the building’s other uses would be.

The property is one of several the Modern acquired during the last decade in mapping out an ambitious expansion. A glass-and-steel addition designed by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi was completed in November 2004.

Hines also plans to provide about 10,000 square feet in the new building’s basement for museum storage.

After construction expenses for the new galleries are covered, the Modern estimates that some $65 million will go to its $650 million endowment.

“This is a Christmas present,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s a tremendous boon to enhancing what is already an extraordinary collection.” The 10 percent addition to the endowment will go toward caring for the collections and acquisitions. No firm timetable for construction has been set, he added, but he estimated that completion of the new building was at least five years away.

In 1996 the museum bought the Dorset Hotel, a 19-story building from the 1920s next door on West 54th Street, along with two adjacent brownstones in a $50 million transaction. Much of that land was used for Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. That expansion, including an increase in MoMA’s endowment to cover operating expenses, cost $858 million in total.

The museum also quietly purchased other parcels on West 54th Street, including what had been the City Athletic Club, a brownstone and a sliver building next door.

Over the years, Mr. Lowry said, the museum has been inundated with offers from developers interested in buying the land, but did not seriously consider selling until recently.

“But as the market went into overdrive it seemed like the right move to make,” he said. The Modern put out the word that it was open to offers and the response was overwhelming.

Hines was the highest bidder, Mr. Lowry said. “We ultimately settled on Hines because of its financial offer and because it has a good reputation for working with architects,” Mr. Lowry said. He added that no architect had been selected to design the new building or the Modern’s additional galleries.

When Mr. Tanaguchi conceived his design he took into consideration a possible future expansion to the west, Mr. Lowry said, making it structurally easy to break through to what will be the new building and extend each of the three gallery floors by about 17,000 square feet.

Jerry I. Speyer, a Modern trustee and real estate developer who is president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer, helped negotiate the sale. (He was instrumental in the purchase of the Dorset Hotel, too.)

“The museum is not in the real estate business, but in the business of showing art, collecting art and educating people about art,” Mr. Speyer said. “Because of the figuration of the land, there was a limit to the amount of space we could use for galleries.”

He said that the entire board agreed that now was the time to act. “Everyone felt great about the decision,” he said of the sale. “There were no issues in anyone’s mind.”

The parcel as a whole consists of about 200,000 square feet of buildable space, Mr. Lowry said.

The addition also opens the way for the museum to address wide criticism of the exhibition spaces in the Taniguchi building. When the Modern reopened in 2004 many faulted its curators for showing fewer artworks in its expanded galleries than it had before.

“The goal has always been to display the collection better,” Mr. Lowry said. Responding to the criticism, he said the display of art in the museum’s previous incarnation was “overly dense,” which people felt was “too much like a textbook.”

Trying to anticipate the museum’s needs for contemporary art display is not easy. Mr. Lowry said the new galleries would be designed to be flexible.

“We envision them to include space that will deal with the unanticipated changes of the future,” he said.

And whereas MoMA had to close its doors on West 54th Street during the 2002-04 building project, operating a temporary museum in Queens, Mr. Lowry said that would not be necessary this time.

“The construction of these galleries will not entail closing the museum again,” he said.

[NYguy]

Posted on curbed.com

Historical Society Throwdown on the UWS

http://www.curbed.com/2007_02_nyhs-thumb.jpg

The New York Historical Society brought their proposed renovation plans to the community last night, and the community came out in force to object to their hi-rise plans. A Curbed tipster was in attendance and reports:

Big community meeting last night at the Unitarian church on the Upper West Side across from the NY Historical Society. The Society came to talk to the neighborhood about its $15 million renovation, but said little about what they called the "second project," the potential high-rise condo they would build right off of CPW and 76th. That angered almost everybody there since no one objected to the museum part, but everyone turned out to vent against the hi-rise. Bill Moyers, a neighborhood resident, got a standing ovation when he told a museum rep that he could only support the museum renovation if the Society promised not to build the hi-rise.

He [Moyers] argued that once that space off CPW was gone "you can never get it back." The Society was definite in its response: they said flatly to Moyers that it could make no such promise. They have sent out RFPs to developers and promise to return to the nabe when they have something definite to discuss about the hi-rise, or even if they will have one. I bet, that is when the sparks will really begin to fly.

The Society's Strategic Plan has all the details on the renovation. We can't wait for the Starchitect naming and eventual showdown with the Landmarks commission.

https://www.nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=whats_new&page=detail_pr&id=3026490

[NYguy]

NY Times

On the Town, Sized Down, Jazzed Up

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/01/arts/queens.600.jpg

East River views: David Strauss of the Queens Museum of Art on the New York City Panorama.


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A small world after all? At the Queens Museum of Art, a panorama built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair has been revitalized.


By COREY KILGANNON
February 2, 2007

There is a spot in New York City where you can watch the dawn blush over Jamaica Bay in Queens and slip swiftly down the shore to Coney Island in Brooklyn, then hop across New York Harbor to suburban stretches of Staten Island.

As the Bronx begins to bustle and Manhattan jolts to life, the chirping of birds gives way to the snort of street sounds and taxi horns. And then a smooth voice-over reminds you that the city is “the center of civilization.”

This virtual New York City sunrise comes courtesy of the Queens Museum of Art, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and can be experienced once an hour from any vantage point on the balcony walkways around the perimeter of its New York City Panorama, which has been closed since October for renovation and reopens Sunday with a newly installed audiovisual accompaniment presentation.

The panorama reopens with the museum’s new exhibition on Robert Moses, who had the panorama built for the 1964 World’s Fair. It became a permanent exhibit in the Queens Museum when the museum opened in 1972 in the fair’s old New York Pavilion building.

The panorama, the museum’s centerpiece, is widely known as the world’s largest architectural model of a city, and yet remains relatively obscure. Yes, there have been live tour guides and headphone tours, but for decades the extent of its presentation apparatus has been the aging dimmable house lights.

Museum officials have long wrestled with ways to revitalize the model and expand its possibilities. They even mused about asking New York developers and building owners to sponsor a model in the panorama in return for a little sign on it plugging the real building. (Are you listening, Mr. Trump?) They finally became sold on the benefits of adding a multimedia accompaniment, after seeing a temporary presentation created for the International Olympic Committee in 2005 to show how the city could be converted to an Olympic village.

“The panorama is by far our biggest attraction, and we really wanted to bring it to life and attract more viewers,” said the museum’s director, Tom Finkelpearl, who explained that the new equipment — with its ability to spotlight different parts of the city with audiovisual sideshows, could be adapted to give various types of New York theme presentations.

The model was built with incredible topological and architectural accuracy. Its roughly 895,000 tiny buildings, streets, parks and bridges are made mostly of wood and plastic and all built to scale, from bridge length to park acreage to skyscraper height.

The 321 square miles of the city’s five boroughs are sprawled over the model’s 9,335 square feet. An inch equals 100 feet, Far Rockaway is a jump shot from Central Park, and the 1,500-foot-tall Empire State Building is 15 inches. The beach at Coney Island is just over 13 feet long, the Staten Island ferry would travel 22 feet, and the Bronx Zoo covers 1,500 square inches.

The panorama, which lacks people, traffic, trash and other real-life elements, was originally built for $672,000. Other than a 1992 overhaul that modernized many of the low-rise buildings and added newer structures, this upgrade is its most significant. It cost $750,000, part of which was originally earmarked for a “Tribute in Light” to replace the 13-inch gray blocks that represent the twin towers. But tests indicated that the light would be seen only if there was dust in the air, so for now the blocks remain in place.

The new presentation equipment, a stack of computerized audio and sound equipment, sits high on a balcony. It is connected to video projectors, speakers, automatically controlled spotlights and a network of colored lights around the perimeter, near the ramp that affords viewers a bird’s-eye view of the metropolis.

Mr. Finkelpearl said the presentation recalled some of the original bells and whistles that accompanied the panorama when it opened at the World’s Fair and is meant to give viewers the feel of a helicopter ride over the city. Viewers rode in fake helicopter cars on tracks around the periphery of the model. Narration was provided by the newscaster Lowell Thomas (who uttered the “center of civilization” line).

One recent weekday Mr. Finkelpearl stood on the walkway for a demonstration of the 12-minute presentation about New York and Robert Moses and how the model was built partly to emphasize his accomplishments in consolidating the city with bridges and highways connecting the boroughs.

Each borough is spotlighted, as are the Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers. Ellis Island is lighted, and you can hear the sound of voices of the huddled masses. A strobe light depicts the chaos of Midtown Manhattan.

This is, after all, the Queens Museum, and the most fuss is made over Queens. The presentation includes audio and video clips recorded recently in specific ethnic neighborhoods like Jackson Heights’s Indian immigrant community and the Greeks and Arabs of Astoria.

Also on hand was Blagovesta Momchedjikova, a tour guide for the model whose enthusiasm for it has earned her the nickname “Queen of the Panorama.”

Ms. Momchedjikova, who helped develop the script, now teaches a writing class at New York University, using the model as an inspiration and subject matter for memories of New York. She wrote a 250-page doctoral dissertation on the model.

The embodiment of the ethnic mix of Queens, Ms. Momchedjikova is a Bulgarian immigrant who married a Senegalese immigrant, Mady Cisse, and they have a baby boy named Moussa, the Senegalese version of the name Moses.

She said she was excited about the presentation but emphasized that viewing the model also is a personal, meditative experience, a communion with your own personal New York, the cognitive model you have in your memory where all your memories — where you lived, worked, fell in love — play out.

“Most people want personal time with the model because it’s a big repository of all we’ve experienced in New York,” she said. “It gives us a tactile experience of where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

[NYguy]

NY Sun

‘Museum Mile' Expands

By KATE TAYLOR
February 9, 2007

The Museum for African Art yesterday unveiled the design for its future home on Fifth Avenue, at the northeast corner of Central Park, to an audience that included Mayor Bloomberg and the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer. When it opens in 2009, the museum, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, will be the first new major arts institution on "Museum Mile" since the Guggenheim opened in 1959.

"Because of the incredible diversity of New York, I've always said that you can see the world on a single subway fare," Mr. Bloomberg said at the unveiling, held at the Guggenheim Museum. "Now you can see the world's art on a walk down Fifth Avenue."

The location, between 109th and 110th streets, will put the Museum for African Art at the "symbolic crossroads where Harlem meets Museum Mile," its director, Elsie McCabe, said. The building will occupy 90,000 square feet, with 16,000 square feet of gallery space, a restaurant, a theater, an education center, conservation and storage facilities, and a dramatic roof garden overlooking 110th Street. Ground will be broken in the spring, and the museum will open in its new building in 2009, which will be its 25th anniversary.

The museum is on a capital campaign to raise $80 million, which will include $10 million to create an endowment. With gifts from trustees, $12 million from the city, and the sale of air rights to the developers of a residential tower that will rise above the edifice, the museum has so far raised almost $50 million.

The museum, which was founded in 1984 to promote appreciation of African art and culture, has spent the past two decades in rented spaces on the Upper East Side, in SoHo, and, most recently, in Long Island City. Its exhibitions have traveled to institutions around the country and abroad. In its new building, for the first time, the museum will have a home for its permanent collection and for its extensive education programs.

The journey to yesterday's announcement was a long one, revealing both the power and the perils of arts-business partnerships. The museum was originally going to develop the Fifth Avenue site, which consists of five lots, with Edison Schools Inc. Edison was to relocate its headquarters there, and build a flagship school with an Afrocentric curriculum based in part on the museum's educational programs. But in 2002, Edison saw its stock price plummet, and it pulled out of the partnership. That left the museum with a short time in which to buy both the lot Edison owned and the four adjacent cityowned lots.

A $9 million loan from the Community Preservation Corporation, led by Michael Lappin, enabled the museum to move quickly on purchasing the lots. Later, with the help of the chairman of the museum's building committee, John Tishman, it found new partners in the residential developers Brickman Associates and Sidney Fetner & Associates. By selling them the air rights to build a 19-story condominium — picture it as a Museum Tower for East Harlem — the museum was able to defray the costs of the land, as well as the construction and development.

Like those at Museum Tower, which rises above the Museum of Modern Art, the units in the condominium will be market-rate. "We paid nearly $17 million for all the land," Ms. McCabe said. "The only affordable housing is for the museum's home."

The addition to Museum Mile of a museum dedicated to African art and culture is a major event, the New York City cultural commissioner, Kate Levin, said. Museums "play a psychological role: They help us map out what culture is, what aesthetics are," she said.

The museum's education programs at its new home will include a semester-long afterschool program called "Passport to Africa," in which students will come to the museum one day a week to learn about African art and culture. Part of the program will involve studying a replica of an African village, town, or city, which the museum will construct and reinstall twice a year.

Ms. McCabe acknowledged that museums of Western art do not make so much effort to put their collections in a cultural context, since that context is familiar to most of their audience. But children "learn comparatively little about Africa, to the point that many still ask us if there is electricity in Africa, do people wear clothes," Ms. McCabe said, while adults associate Africa with war, famine, and plagues. The museum seizes every opportunity to change such stereotypes, she said. "Pride in being African-American and respect for those who are, is made easier if there is a fundamental appreciation of Africa — its art, its culture, its past, its future."

[NYguy]

NY Times

Museum for African Art Finds Its Place

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Designs were unveiled Thursday for a building by Robert A.M. Stern that will be the permanent home for the Museum for African Art, on Fifth Avenue at 110th Street. It will be the first museum built along Museum Mile since the Guggenheim, 1959.


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A rendering of the lobby of the new home for the Museum for African Art.


By SEWELL CHAN
February 9, 2007

The Museum for African Art, which has had a nomadic existence since it opened in 1984, will finally gain a permanent home in a soaring new building designed by Robert A. M. Stern, on Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets, officials announced yesterday.

Models and renderings of the new structure, which will face the northeast corner of Central Park, were unveiled at a news conference at the Guggenheim Museum, some 20 blocks south of the site.

Presiding over the event, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the project as “the first new construction of a museum on Museum Mile since the great Guggenheim opened in 1959.”

With 90,000 square feet, including 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, the building will give the Museum for African Art a long-coveted base, said Elsie McCabe, the institution’s president. Officials hope to break ground in the spring of 2008 and complete construction by the end of 2009.

The estimated cost is $80 million, of which $49 million has been raised, including $12 million from the city.

A tower of 115 luxury condominiums will be built above the museum, under a partnership between the museum and two developers, Brickman and Sidney Fetner Associates. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the structure will be a shimmering glass wall made up of what Mr. Stern’s firm calls “dancing mullions,” after the slender vertical members that form the division between window units

At the museum’s center will be a great hall entered from Fifth Avenue, with the mullions on the left and a soaring wall on the right, made of richly colored etimoe wood from Ghana, that curves upward to form the ceiling.

The wall “suggests, if you look at it, the woven shapes of baskets and so forth — and weaving is so much a part of African art,” Mr. Stern said in an interview. “It’s not a literal interpretation. It’s an abstract one.”

At the rear, a cylindrical enclosure sheathed in perforated copper that Mr. Stern likened to a drum will house a staircase. Mr. Stern, who is dean of the Yale School of Architecture, called it a “21st-century version” of the concrete stairwell enclosures at Louis I. Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery, considered a Modernist masterpiece.

The New York firm SCLE Architects will work with Mr. Stern on the project.

He noted that his other works of public architecture — the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.; the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, an ornithology center in Jamestown, N.Y.; and a planned American Revolution Center at Valley Forge, Pa. — have revolved to some extent around a personality.

“This, like the Rockwell, is a major art museum, but it’s not built around a person, but around a continent,” Mr. Stern said. “It takes Africa out of the museums of natural history where it sometimes is — and also out of museums of the modern art.” He noted that over the last century, African masks and figures have sometimes been displayed as if their function were to inspire the Cubism of Braque or Picasso.

Founded as the Center for African Art in 1984 by Susan Mullin Vogel, now a professor of art history at Columbia University, the museum gained broad recognition for its innovative conceptual approaches to exhibiting African art.

It occupied two adjacent town houses on East 68th Street before moving to rented quarters in SoHo in 1993. Around 2000, Ms. McCabe arranged a partnership with Edison Schools, the for-profit education company, to buy a parcel on Fifth Avenue from a housing developer. (She said the site had once housed a low-rise commercial building.)

Plans called for Edison to build a school and a corporate headquarters on the site while providing space for the museum to build a structure for itself. In 2001 the company’s stock price nose-dived, and it abandoned the project in 2002, shortly after the museum had moved to a temporary location in Long Island City, Queens.

With a loan from the Community Preservation Corporation, the museum secured the land from Edison by 2003. Then, with help from two of its trustees — John L. Tishman of the Tishman Realty and Construction Corporation and Jonathan D. Green of the Rockefeller Group Development Corporation — the museum arranged a partnership with the two developers, Brickman and Sidney Fetner.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation recently arranged the sale of four other parcels to the partnership, clearing the way for the work to begin.

Mr. Stern said the challenge was to design a museum with “a strong civic public identity within the larger framework of a commercial apartment house — and at the same time, to make a building that is glassy and open, but not a knee-jerk glass block.”

Ms. McCabe said: “We knew if anybody could marry us distinctively with a residential building, he could. And God bless him, he did.”

A Harvard-trained lawyer who worked for Mayor David N. Dinkins from 1990 to 1993, Ms. McCabe has led the museum for nine years. She oversees a staff of 18 and an annual budget of roughly $3 million.

The museum has organized about 55 exhibitions, many of them traveling across the United States and so far to 17 other countries. It has published more than 40 books and provided teacher training and curriculums to more than 350 schools.

Although the museum has eschewed collecting in favor of borrowing works from other institutions, it does plan a small permanent exhibition at the new site.

“We’re a small museum that’s populated by zealots,” Ms. McCabe said. “We not only want to introduce children and adults to the beauty of African art, we want to introduce them in a variety of ways to the beauty and the majesty of the people who created it too.”

[jackie60]

i didn't see the new museum posted anywhere.
i have been walking over every week or so to see the progress.
the bowery is changing fast.

http://www.newmuseum.org/now_new_initiatives.php

[jackie60]

i am very interested in the cooper union project too.

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/morphosis/cooperunion/cooperunion.html

[NYguy]

NY Times

Historical Society Loses Round in Fight to Renovate a Landmark

By GLENN COLLINS
March 7, 2007

In a stormy two-hour meeting before 200 neighborhood residents last night, the New-York Historical Society was rebuffed by Community Board 7 in Manhattan, which resoundingly opposed the group’s proposal to renovate the exterior of its landmark building at 170 Central Park West.

The board voted 40 to 2 against a plan that would replace the society’s eight-foot-wide doorway, built in 1908, with a 40-foot glass entryway and granite portico at the main entrance between West 76th and 77th Streets.

Because the board is an advisory body, its decision does not block the renovation. But as a signal of strong community opposition, the vote could carry weight with the New York City Planning Commission and the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is likely to hold a hearing on the plan this month. Both groups have veto power over the project.

Louise Mirrer, the historical society’s president, said the community board inappropriately linked the renovation plan to the construction of a 23-story luxury residential tower that the society has proposed as an addition to its four-story building.

“I’m disappointed,” Dr. Mirrer said, adding that the community board’s vote, if used as a precedent, “would prevent any landmark anywhere from ever doing anything new.”

Kate Wood, executive director of Landmark West, an Upper West Side preservation group, said that the historical society’s project “deserves to be stopped in its tracks.” She described it as “a Trojan horse” for the luxury tower and added, “Please don’t open the gate.”

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said he could not take a position for or against the plan. “But we should call it what it is,” he said. “It’s going to be a large tower. It’s not about phase one tonight — it’s about what comes after the facade.”

Dr. Mirrer argued that the renovation is essential to make the building more inviting and its exhibitions more accessible, and, she added, that it might be years before a tower could be approved. But Peter M. Wright, co-chairman of the Park West 77th Street Block Association, termed the design “an ill-conceived facade.” The tower, he said, would intrude upon the Central Park skyline and cast a shadow on the park itself.

“I’m pleased,” Mr. Wright said of the vote, adding that it was a step toward defeating the tower plan.

For weeks, preservation groups that oppose the renovation had been e-mailing their members to attend the meeting, held in an auditorium at the American Bible Society at West 61st Street and Broadway. The society, meanwhile, had been exhorting its members to lobby elected city officials to support the plan.

The debate — which followed an hour of discussion on other projects — was punctuated with catcalls and applause. The society’s plan proposes changes not only to the Central Park West entrance, it also would de-emphasize the West 77th Street entrance and reconfigure existing windows there for the construction of a cafe.

The opposition of the community board “bears the hallmark of a group that has campaigned against the historical society,” Dr. Mirrer said. “Of course we will press on.”

[NYguy]

NY Times

On the Bowery, a New Home for New Art

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Officials at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which is moving from SoHo, say the new building on the Bowery will change the face of the Lower East Side when it opens at the end of the year.

By CAROL VOGEL
March 28, 2007

NAMING rights for a museum’s grand spaces are part of the deal for valued donors these days. But when the New Museum of Contemporary Art began its capital campaign for a $50 million building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the bathrooms were the first places to be christened.

“I’m 83,” said Jerome L. Stern, a retired venture capitalist, “and I thought it would be nice to see my name in a place where I’m going to spend a lot of time.”

As a result of his generosity, the museum’s four public bathrooms will be the Jerome and Ellen Stern Restrooms. While Mr. Stern would not say exactly what they cost, he said the price tag was in the six figures.

At institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art, such a check may get you an invitation to a fancy dinner or a peek at a private art collection with one of its curators, but it would not get your name on so much as a filing cabinet. Nonetheless, the art world uptown is paying close attention to the New Museum’s building rising on the Bowery. When it opens at the end of the year, its jutting, silvery configuration will be an architectural landmark for New York City and another addition to the cultural building boom sweeping the country.

But beyond the concrete and steel, the New Museum shows how a lesser-known institution can attract attention by taking chances. It hired an adventurous team of architects. It has diversified its board of trustees. It is doubling its staff, bolstering its exhibition schedule and greatly expanding its education activities.

Combine that with the museum’s re-energized mission — to showcase the newest art — and the result is an institution that poses a bold challenge to established museums. With the contemporary art market boiling over as newly rich collectors compete at fairs, auctions and galleries, the New Museum will be a ready-made hive for dealers, clients and the Prada-clad art-world swarm that follows them. For artists, having works on display there could bring faster recognition and probably higher prices.

The image of scrappy contender extends to the trustees, who like to say they are “shirt-sleeve, not black-tie” and delight in flouting the conventions of older museums.

Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director, spent 23 years as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art before joining the New Museum in 1999. She “has put together a board with people other institutions have wanted to get on their boards,” said Arne Glimcher, chairman of the PaceWildenstein Gallery. “But they choose the New Museum because they sense the energy and commitment.”

She has also attracted prominent talent to work with her, like Massimiliano Gioni, a curator at the most recent Berlin Biennial; Richard Flood, the former chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and Laura Hoptman, a former curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

For the opening exhibition in the new building, the three curators are putting together an international sculpture show.

Ms. Phillips’s credentials are not too dissimilar to those of the founder of the New Museum, Marcia Tucker, who started it in 1977, the day after she was fired from her position as a curator at the Whitney. Her dismissal came just two weeks after the closing of a Richard Tuttle exhibition, at the time one of the Whitney’s most provocative.

The New Museum first opened in a poky office space on Hudson Street and then moved several times. Its new home, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo firm Sanaa, will be a seven-story 60,000-square-foot building on the site of an old parking lot at 235 Bowery at Prince Street, a dramatic configuration of irregularly stacked boxes clad in shiny metal. The museum will have more than twice its previous exhibition space, as well as a floor for educational activities, a 200-seat theater, a cafe and a bookstore.

In the gazetteer of small New York museums, the New Museum is racing to the top of the page. The Dia Art Foundation lost its most generous donor last year when Leonard Riggio resigned from the foundation, and it has no place in Manhattan to mount exhibitions after closing its two Chelsea spaces in 2004. The Drawing Center, without a director for a year, is moving from its SoHo home to a former Fulton Fish Market site near the South Street Seaport.

“It’s not about the money, its about the people; that’s why we’ve been so successful,” said Saul Dennison, the longtime president of the New Museum. “Everyone is passionate about contemporary art, and everyone on the board actually likes each other.”

Larger institutions require people to make multimillion-dollar donations to get on a board, but at the New Museum a candidate has to prove a commitment to contemporary art and the ability to get along with the current trustees. Being a board member requires a minimum annual contribution of $25,000 as well as a six-figure check for the building campaign, although several trustees stretched into the seven figures, Ms. Phillips said. Trustees say they have many more people wanting to join the board — which Ms. Phillips has expanded to 35 from 18 — than will ever win a place.

Before asking someone to join the board, members want prospective trustees to become involved with the museum by joining a museum committee, which often involves participating in museum-organized trips.

“We like to spend time getting to know the person before getting married,” Ms. Phillips said. “Our expectations are completely different than, say, the MoMA board.”

One trustee, James-Keith Brown, started his association with the New Museum in the mid-1990s by joining the producers council, a $5,000-a-year benefactor group that does things like visiting artists’ studios and taking trips led by the museum’s curators. He recalls that as a young contemporary art collector, he found it an entertaining group that offered a good opportunity to meet like-minded collectors.

“At the time, I was also working on the young collectors group at the Guggenheim,” he said. “But this was different. It showed me a new way of looking at things.”

With the hedge fund professionals fueling the market for contemporary art, it would be easy to fill a board with young Wall Street wizards. But the museum’s board isn’t just made up of financiers like Mr. Brown — or of New Yorkers. The trustees are an international group ranging from collectors in their early 40s to people in their 80s, from retailers to curators.

The board spent a year scouring the city for its new home. “It wasn’t till we saw the empty parking lot on the Lower East Side that we knew we’d found the spot,” Ms. Phillips said. “The board saw the potential before I did. They saw right away how consistent it was with the museum’s mission. They loved the fact that the neighborhood was rough and the street was languishing, and that it was a major avenue with easy subway access.”

Knowing how much to spend was the first order of business. That meant knowing what the museum could get for its previous home in SoHo. (In 2002, it sold for $18 million.) The New Museum was able to buy the Bowery site for $5 million. That meant it had to start a capital campaign drive to raise an estimated $64 million to cover the building and endowment. To date, more than $60 million has been raised.

Unlike, say, the Whitney, MoMA or Dia, which have all had one or two supergenerous leaders writing unusually big checks to carry a project, the New Museum does not have what it calls “the 500-pound gorilla.”

“This is a group that has its eye on the ball,” said Stephanie French, a board member who was the head of philanthropy at Philip Morris and now works in wealth management at U.S. Trust. “It’s a self-examining group. We know we need to be realistic, and as the budget grows, we realize we’ll have to keep raising money.”

When she founded the museum, Ms. Tucker decided it should buy works and sell them 10 years later so that its collection would always be new. It was an innovative plan that was never carried out. The museum now has a modest collection of about 1,000 works in many media. Ms. Phillips said that while it did not consider itself a collecting institution, it will add to its collections through gifts and commissions.

Many on the board think that not having a large collection is a big advantage. For starters, it’s difficult for a museum dedicated to new art to have a collection. “We want to always be on the cutting edge,” said Dieter Bogner, an independent museum curator from Vienna. “It’s a building for the future, the next generation, unlike most museums, which are a place to see the past.”

William E. Ford, who is in the private equity business and has been a board member for two and a half years, said: “When you look at programs at MoMA, the Whitney or the Guggenheim, they all need to mount blockbusters to support their buildings. The gravity of their collections is a lens through which they see themselves. Since we’re not bound by these constraints, it allows us to concentrate on our programs.”

Mitzi Eisenberg, a trustee who was one of the founders of Bed Bath & Beyond, said she was proud that the museum took risks. “We’ve given a chance to artists many people had never heard of, like Richard Prince and Jeff Koons,” she said. Now they are superstars.

Ms. Phillips said the museum planned to continue exhibiting new talent and underrecognized artists, giving many their first opportunity to be shown in a museum.

Officials at the museum also say that once the new building opens, it will change the complexion of the Lower East Side, just as its presence changed SoHo in the early 1980s, when it provoked a rush of galleries to Broadway.

“It will become an exciting place to go,” Ms. Eisenberg said.

With growth comes the fear that the museum may become more like others — a larger place with a bigger building and even more ambition — which could mean losing its edge and settling in to middle age.

Paul T. Schnell, a Manhattan lawyer and longtime board member, sees the challenge ahead. “We can’t become a victim of our own success,” he said. “We’re all very conscious that there’s a risk of losing our edge. It’s something the board and the staff worry about. So much so, that we’re all committed to making sure that that won’t happen.”

[NYguy]

Bloomberg

Farewell Chelsea? New Museum Begins to Draw Galleries to Bowery

By Michael Killeen
April 25 (Bloomberg)

A 160-foot-tall pile of big, stacked boxes clad in zinc-plated steel is rising above the fire-escape tenements and restaurant suppliers of Manhattan's Bowery. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by the Japanese firm Sejima & Nishizawa/SANAA, expects to move into its new home by the end of the year. But the anomalous structure is already exerting a pull.

Around the corner on Freeman Alley, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who operates Salon 94 gallery out of her townhouse on the Upper East Side, is renovating a 1,400-square-foot space to show art. The architect is Rafael Vinoly, who also designed her gallery uptown.

``The New Museum, in my mind, is going to be a major cultural destination. And so we will be a small space to visit at the same time,'' said Greenberg Rohatyn, adding that she runs a ``boutique-based business, always a little off the beaten track.''

Her new gallery, which will keep the original concrete floors and wooden beams, plans a soft opening this summer, with an official debut in September.

Why didn't she join the more than 300 galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan's major contemporary-art destination? ``It is hard to distinguish oneself in that area unless you have a super- gallery,'' Greenberg Rohatyn said. Downtown costs are a third of Chelsea, she added, ``although I see that is going to change very quickly.''

Those prices may hold for an alley location but vary around the Bowery.

Bowery Rentals

Space on the Bowery from the New Museum at Prince Street down to Delancey Street is about $85 a square foot, according to Nathan Stange of Susan Penzner Real Estate. Rents are ``more established going west,'' he said, reaching $125 to $150 a square foot on Spring and Prince streets.

Realtor Susan B. Anthony, whose firm focuses on galleries, said ground-floor space in Chelsea, if you can find it, ``is going for $80 to $85 a square foot.'' Available upper-floor gallery space, she said, ranges between $35 and $40 a square foot in Chelsea but awaits development in the Bowery area. Spaces east of the Bowery are $60 to $80 a square foot, she said, getting more expensive the closer they are to the New Museum.

Dealer Christopher Henry almost took Greenberg Rohatyn's Freeman Alley site. Then he found a two-story brick building with a low stoop on nearby Elizabeth Street he preferred.

Younger Clients

Henry opened his first gallery on West 29th Street in 2005, though rising rents and disappointing foot traffic on his stretch of north Chelsea compelled him to rethink his location. He liked the younger buyers he attracted when he exhibited at the recent Scope fairs in Miami and New York. Those clients not only responded well to the emerging artists he represents but supported his idea to move downtown.

Henry wanted a gallery with architectural character. The long-vacant annex to a Ukrainian Orthodox Church is now strewn with rubble, though the $100,000 conversion, he said, will leave the almost 20-foot peaked ceiling as it is: ``This space is too good to clutter up.''

One of this area's draws, Henry said, is that it's a real, lived-in neighborhood, with a history, convenient transportation and plenty of restaurants.

Henry has resided near the Bowery since 1986, when it was, he said, ``a ghost town.'' It's now thriving, though he thinks the museum will cause a seismic shift.

``The New Museum broke ground, the steel was going up -- this was a different kind of feeling, a different bell ringing,'' Henry said. ``I just kind of knew this was where I needed to be.''

The New Museum of Contemporary Art plans to open in late 2007 at 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Manhattan. Information: +1-212-219-1222; http://newmuseum.org .

(Michael Killeen is an art writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: mkilleen5@verizon.net .

Last Updated: April 25, 2007 00:05 EDT

[NYguy]

http://www.gothamist.com/2007/04/26/new_more_access.php

New Entrance Approved for Historical Society

April 26, 2007

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On Tuesday, the New-York Historical Society scored a victory at the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), which unanimously approved a scaled-down plan to renovate the building's exterior. In spite of unrelenting criticism from local Community Board 7, the LPC panel affirmed the appropriateness of modifications such as:

- A recessed glass entrance vestibule with two new portals adapted from current windows at the Central Park West entrance.
- Wider main staircase and free-standing graphic kiosks (CPW).
- Enlarged windows and ADA-compliant entrance ramp at the West 77th St. entrance.

The New-York Historical Society has evolved into a much more progressive institution than the stuffy, exclusive architecture of its 1908 building would suggest. Created by York and Sawyer to exude neoclassical pomp, the building "was designed as a private club that did not intend to embrace the public," said the architect Paul Spencer Byard in a November 1st NY Times interview. Byard's firm of Platt Byard Dovell White has designed the renovation just approved.

According to the society's press statement, "These changes will enable an internal renovation designed to make the Historical Society into a modern and accessible community, education and cultural facility for children, scholars and the general public." Added Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson, "The New-York Historical Society headquarters... was built to preserve the legacy of old, rich, white families."

The entrance renovation--modest in scope as it is, compared with more dramatic plans rebuffed last week by the LPC--will present a more inviting and open public face.

Judging from yesterday's Times article and a meeting held on March 6, the community's concerns appear founded in another of the society's projects, a hypothetical 23-story residential tower that would have to earn separate approval in order to proceed. The notion that historic buildings have to be pickled in formaldehyde in order to foster long-term preservation has been spectacularly disproved in cities around the world. For example, the recent glass addition to the Morgan Library and Museum at Madison and 36th St. (infinitely more transformative than the subtle N-YHS plan) highlights the building's history while renewing its contemporary relevance.

http://www.gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_gideon/07_04_NYHS_Rend-77st.jpg

https://www.nyhistory.org/future/StrategicPlan/

http://www.landmarkwest.org/advocacy/nyhs.html

[NYguy]

http://www.theslatinreport.com/story.jsp?StoryName=0619moma.txt&Topic=Design&fromPage=

HINES + NOUVEL = MORE MOMA

http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/museumtower.jpg

Will Nouvel's new 54th Street tower tower over Cesar Pelli's 1985 Museum Tower behind it on West 53rd?

Peter Slatin
DESIGN | NYC 06 19 07


After a fierce and very hush-hush competition among five world-leading architects, France's Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design a new 60-plus story tower in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. To rise next to – and be joined with - the Museum of Modern Art's sleek, serene and recently expanded home on West 54th Street, the new building will contain 75,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the museum. Sources say it will also contain speculative office space and – bien sur – luxury condominiums.

The developer is Houston-based Hines Interests in partnership with Whitehall Street, the Goldman Sachs group, which earlier this year won the right to acquire and develop the 17,000-square-foot, block-through parcel. It stands immediately west of MoMA and was previously occupied by the historic City Athletic Club on West 54th Street; the club closed in 2002 and was acquired by the museum out of bankruptcy.

MoMA's press office referred calls to Hines, where a spokeswoman said that it was "too early" to say anything. But sources familiar with the design competition and the project confirmed the selection of Nouvel. Whitehall also declined to comment.

One challenge in going public with the selection may be the fast-changing world of finance. Earlier this year the developers were seeking more than $125 million in debt financing for the project, a figure that sources say could rise by an additional $100-plus million, depending on potential zoning variances for the site. But at the time, even though Manhattan's high-end condo market had begun to rebound from a stall in the last half of 2006, at least one lender balked at the borrowers' willingness to pay more than $750 a buildable, or FAR, square foot for the site.

Another issue that may be delaying an announcement: whether the new MoMA galleries – which will not have their own entrance but will simply be extensions of the existing galleries, will be designed by Nouvel or by the Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect of who designed MoMA's renovation and expansion, which opened in 2005. Sources say that it's most likely that it will be Taniguchi who designs the new exhibit halls, which will occupy the first six floors of the building.

There is also the question of the direct involvement of Nouvel himself; the architect has been known to be less than conspicuous at some of his projects, and no doubt Hines wants to be sure that it gets Nouvel when it hires Nouvel.

MoMA has been pressed to add new space ever since the renovation opened, following complaints from many quarters that the new galleries were lacking in grace and space and had lost some important qualities following the museum's reopening.

The new building is the 62-year-old Nouvel's third, largest and most central Manhattan commission. His first New York building, 40 Mercer Street in SoHo, which was also developed by Hines and Whitehal, along with developer Andre Balasz, is nearly complete. A second, 20-story building is in development by Alf Naman and Cape Advisors at Eleventh Avenue and 19th Street, across from Frank O. Gehry's (and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg's) luminescent InterActive Center, opened earlier this year.

Nouvel has been selected over submissions by Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Morphosis; Reiser and Umamoto; and Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners. Any one of these architects would doubtless have added something striking to the city's skyline, which is quickly developing nodes of exciting new residential architecture. Tribeca has Philip Johnson's Urban Glass House and a small building by Winka Dubbeldam; Chelsea has the burgeoning, adventurous High Line corridor anchored by the IAC; and Midtown has 53rd and 54th Streets, where more commercial offerings include Norman Foster's anticipated Shangri-La Hotel and condos for RFR Holdings just a few blocks east of MoMA on 53rd Street. And there is of course Cesar Pelli's original Museum Tower, partly behind and even adjacent to the new tower site, on West 53rd Street.

Still, the path from a star architect's selection to a built project will be a tricky one for Hines and for MoMA and its brand new chair, Jerry Speyer. There are complex air rights questions including transfers from historic properties nearby; one package has already been assembled by MoMA and is being transferred to Hines along with the site. However, further air rights are yet to be nailed down and delivered, and the ability to do so will certainly affect the outcome of the deal, its size, and its price.

Then, of course, there is the market, which Hines can only hope will show the same durability and value as MoMA's core collection of modern masters.

http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/40mercer.jpg

Nouvel's 40 Mercer condo project in SoHo will open later this year.


http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/100elev.gif

Nouvel has also designed a 20-story condo at Eleventh Ave. and 19th Street, across from Fank Gehry's InterActive Center.


http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/moma54.jpg

The new building will rise jsut to the west of the museum's West 54th St. entrance, which is will share.


http://www.theslatinreport.com/content/pictures/momae53.jpg

The renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art will get 75,000 square feet of new exhibition space.

[NYguy]

curbed.com

West Chelsea Gallery Building: Modern Enough for Ya?

Tuesday, June 26, 2007, by Joey

http://www.curbed.com/2007_6_chelseaarts.jpg
Photo via Flickr/Edward Sudentas

We've pretty much neglected the Chelsea Arts Tower—the 20-story West 25th Street commercial condo building marketed to art galleries—and wouldn't you know it, they went ahead and built the damn thing. And it's pretty crazy lookin'!

We weren't sure how this would sell when it was first announced, but it looks like we underestimated the deep-pocketed Chelsea art scene. According to the building's website, only one unit remains unsold, and two are for lease. If you recall, the Arts Tower helped usher in a new era of West Chelsea development, and if you want to see it spring to life, the official site also has a slew of construction shots...
http://www.chelseaartstower.com/

[NYguy]

worldarchitecturenews.com

The Museum of African Art...
(renderings from Neoscape, for Robert A. M. Stern Architects)


http://worldarchitecturenews.com/project/uploaded_files/882_385%20African%20museum.jpg


http://worldarchitecturenews.com/news_images/882_1_1000SternView_from_Museum_Mile.jpg


http://worldarchitecturenews.com/news_images/882_2_1000SternAfricanArtMuseumLobby.jpg

[NYguy]

Posted on curbed.com

New New Museum Getting All Mesh-y on The Bowery

http://curbed.com/2007_08_NewMuseumMesh1.JPG

A few weeks ago we gave a little peek of something going up on the facade of the New New Museum rising on The Bowery. And now almost the entire building is covered in what turns out to be a metallic mesh. Workmen on site at the New Museum claim that the facade all around is actually aluminum, which doesn't match up with what was promised here. From an interview with the architects at SANAA posted on the New Museum website:

SANAA: The exterior cladding will be galvanized zinc-plated steel, a material that is extremely strong, yet light. The character of it is a bit rough, just like the Bowery. It's textural in appearance, yet actually smooth to the touch and it is reflective in a way that abstracts its surroundings and suggests a different way of seeing them.

Doesn't look too smooth to us. Was it budget cuts or that old bugaboo "artistic differences" which lead to the mesh-y-ness? Anybody in the know, please drop us a line.

http://curbed.com/2007_08_NewMuseumMesh2.JPG


http://curbed.com/2007_08_NewMuseumMesh6.JPG

[NYguy]

http://gothamist.com/2007/11/29/a_preview_of_th.php

A Preview of the Nearly Opened New Museum

November 29, 2007

http://gothamist.com/attachments/jake/2007_11_newmuseumfrnot.jpg

Beginning at noon this Saturday the New Museum will open its new doors, but this morning
we snuck a peak inside. The gray aluminum mesh exterior of the building is a whimsical stack
of rectilinear boxes shifted off-axis, not unlike a pile of blocks arranged haphazardly by a
toddler. It's a bold, dynamic presence on the Bowery and, along with the Bowery Hotel,
signifies yet another firm step away from the area's gritty past.

After the jump, tons of pictures from inside every nook and cranny of the museum.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM7.jpg

Perhaps the most striking feature inside the seven story museum is the complete absence of
internal columns; the building is held together by a series of cross-bracings and the skylights
allow natural light to filter through spaces where the stories are offset. The three main floors
of galleries are airy but not particularly capacious, creating a cozy, modest context for the
work. The fifth floor is given over to an educational center; the ground floor lobby features a
bookstore, cafe and glass-walled gallery space; the basement level houses a 182-seat
theater. On the seventh floor, an outdoor patio and glass enclosed event space will be used
for installations and private soirees; the view of downtown from up there isn't bad.

The inaugural exhibit is titled "Unmonumental" and is an "international survey on all three main
gallery floors that opens with sculpture by 30 artists from around the globe, then expands
over the course of five months into a dense, teeming environmental experience through the
addition of layers and collage, sound, and internet-based art." This will be on view through
March 23rd, and there are a few major commissioned installations on the horizon as well.
You'll see one of these greeting you before you even enter the building: The "Hell Yes!" sign
(Ugo Rondinone) brightens up the Bowery and will be the first of many public art installations
on the facade.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/jen/2007_11_nm1.jpg_http://gothamist.com/attachments/jen/2007_11_nm2.jpg

Naturally the museum can't afford to be shy about jumping in bed with corporate sponsors, so
the first 30 straight hours of its opening - which goes on continuously through the night - will
be sponsored by Target and admission will be free. Naturally, all the free tickets have already
been distributed. But don't despair; they expect some tickets to go unused, "thus it may be
possible for visitors to show up during the course of the marathon event and get a ticket on
the spur of the moment; but there is absolutely no guarantee!" In other words, you'll have a
good shot of getting in for free around 3am. After they burn through all the Target
sponsorship money, it'll cost $12.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM13.jpg

Above photo of the lobby cafe, with mischievously mis-matched chairs.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM11.jpg

Foreground: "Canon enigmatico a 108 voces" by Abraham Cruzvillegas. Background (sofa
bed) "Fuck Destiny" by Sarah Lucas. Further back is "Cube" by Rebecca Warren.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM3.jpg


Ground floor "BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING" by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

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"Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours (Tree)" by Martin Boyce.
Photo by Jake Dobkin.

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Lower level theater.

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"Split Endz (wig mix)" by Jim Lambie.

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"Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)" by Marc Andre Robinson.

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"Untitled (Kerze)" by Urs Fischer. Photo by Jake Dobkin

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM10.jpg

Lots of architectural critics commented on the slim staircase from the 5th to the 6th floor--
there's a small gallery off the landing with an audio piece.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/nyc_arts_john/112907NM9.jpg

The bathroom tiling is totally insane.

http://gothamist.com/attachments/jake/2007_11_curbedbathroom.jpg

No, seriously-- it's really totally insane. (Picture from our frenemies at Curbed.)

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Skyline shot from the seventh floor balconies-- the view of downtown is the true highlight of the visit.

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View from inside the skybox on the 7th floor.

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Last but not least, a view of the lattice-skin mesh. It doesn't look as good up close as it
does from far away, but it's still kind of funky.

More pictures can be found at the Gothamist Flickr stream.
http://flickr.com/photos/gothamistllc/sets/72157603327643014/

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2112/2074768960_c8fadea8e6_b.jpg

________________________________________

http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/29/curbed_inside_hell_yes_new_museum_revealed.php#more

Curbed Inside: Hell Yes, New Museum Revealed!

Thursday, November 29, 2007, by Lockhart

The New Museum opens to the public on Saturday with a free kick-off extravaganza (did you
get your Target-sponsored reservation?), but the gang at 235 Bowery invited the press over
this morning for a little preview. Finally, we were able to crawl into the womb of SANAA's
crazy minimalist creation, and what we found was—dramatic pause—an art museum. What,
you were expecting a Japanese palace where animé fantasies spring to life in a burst of
rainbows? Us too, but we digress. In truth, the New Museum felt small, like you could knock
the whole thing out in a half-hour before Sunday brunch. But the views (to the LES, Tribeca,
Soho, FiDi and beyond) are killer, and the place sells Cheese Puffs, so it's pretty much a must-see.

http://eater.com/uploads/2007_11_bnmwhatdream.jpg
We booked this room for our Super Bowl party.

http://curbed.com/uploads/2007_11_bnm1.jpg
Seventh Floor event space (The Sky Terrace), looking towards BLUE, THOR et al.

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Seventh Floor, looking downtown.

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Out on the patio, looking west to Soho.

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A preservationist's dream: Trump behind bars.

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The satellite Genius Bar location. Total j/k. It's the fifth-floor resource center! No, you
cannot check your Gmail on them. We tried.

http://curbed.com/uploads/2007_11_jnm2.jpg
Learn, my little contemporary artists, learn!

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The cage (aka Sam Durant's ...For People Who Refuse to Knuckle Down, 2004).

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The most over-hyped stairwell in town? Cue the Goldberger: "The most exciting space in the
building is only four feet wide and some fifty feet high, and is tucked behind the elevators: it
contains a stairway connecting the third- and fourth-floor galleries. I have never been
anywhere at once so eerily narrow and so gloriously monumental." Sure, buddy.

http://curbed.com/uploads/2007_11_jnm1.jpg
Oh, one more thing: Hell Yes!


http://www.newmuseum.org/

[priji]

The Chazen Museum of Art (formerly Elvehjem Museum of Art) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of the nation's leading university art museums. Founded in 1970, its mission is to provide access to original works of art for faculty and students and community members and to present related educational programs in support of the teaching, research, and public service missions of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Chazen features eleven galleries for the presentation of the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, the Mayer Print Center, and the Museum Shop, as well as lecture halls, auditoria, and the Kohler Art Library.

The more than 17,500 works in the museum's permanent collection explore cultures and art move_ments from ancient Egypt to the present. The collection focuses on western European and American painting, sculpture, and graphics with important examples by Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Strozzi, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Eug�ne Boudin, Alexander Archipenko, Naum Gabo, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, Louise Nevelson, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Specialized collections include in-depth holdings of Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese export porcelains, European medals, Soviet socialist-realist paintings, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British watercolors, drawings of Antoine Pevsner, Lalique glass, South and Southeast Asian sculpture, and Indian miniature paintings.

The museum organizes and presents a year-round schedule of temporary exhibitions celebrating national and international art and artists. Major exhibitions include Frank Lloyd Wright and Madison, John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West, Wildeworld: The Art of John Wilde, The Art of Judy Pfaff, and Xu Bing: The Glassy Surface of a Lake.

The museum has exceptional teaching collections of ceramics, medals, coins, silver, furniture, and glass, used by university professors, area schools, and the museum's education department. Educational offerings include gallery tours, lectures and symposia, film and video presentations, and cooperative programming with local communities and arts organizations.

[priji]

http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~tripathi/final/Gallery/chazen%20Museum%20of%20art/23122005(023).jpg
http://www.memberservicecenter.org/webclnt/wimadcvb/IRMWeb/214.JPG

[NYC2ATX]

I have a question. Is the "Hell, Yes!" installation on the facade of the New Museum a permanent fixture? I think it's just too perfect, like a new subject of photography in Manhattan. It's humorous without being ridiculous.

[NYguy]

I have a question. Is the "Hell, Yes!" installation on the facade of the New Museum a permanent fixture? I think it's just too perfect, like a new subject of photography in Manhattan. It's humorous without being ridiculous.

Don't know if that particular sign is permanent, but there will be other works out there.

http://curbed.com/uploads/2007_11_jnm1.jpg

[NYguy]

http://curbed.com/archives/2008/04/15/landmark_queens_museum_finally_ready_for_redo.php?o=0

Landmark Queens Museum Finally Ready for Redo

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The new west facade of the Museum, facing the Grand Central Parkway.


Tuesday, April 15, 2008, by Robert

The landmark Queens Museum of Art building in Flushing Meadows Park is finally ready for a long planned redo, we think. The renovation and expansion have been in the works since 2001 when a radical remake was floated, embraced and, then, repudiated as being a little over the top for a building built for the 1939-40 Worlds Fair that was also the first meeting place of the United Nations.

The new plan, which was unveiled several years ago is designed to "maintain the building's infrastructure without returning it to a particular time period." The $47 million project will double the museum's size as it takes over space currently occupied by an indoor skating rink. The museum remake comes from Grimshaw Architects. The renovation was originally supposed to be finished by 2006, then by 2009. The current target date is 2010. No word on what the final target date is or whether the nearby Philip Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion will collapse from 45 years of neglect in the meantime.

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[NYC2ATX]

Niceeeee. I'm jealous of every other borough. Staten Island deserves some props, we have kind of, sort of an......art.....scene, maybe.

Build SIAM! (Staten Island Art Museum) I totally just made that up. Cool acronym, right?

[NYguy]

Niceeeee. I'm jealous of every other borough. Staten Island deserves some props,

Well, you've got free ferry rides, and a couple of beaches. You've got your very own subway line (no other borough has that). What more do you want?...;)

Besides, you're already a part of the world's greatest city.

[NYC2ATX]

Well, you've got free ferry rides, and a couple of beaches. You've got your very own subway line (no other borough has that). What more do you want?...;)

Besides, you're already a part of the world's greatest city.

Staten Island's beaches are nothing to rave about, and we could still use some more cultural institutions, maybe a more urban downtown area (which is supposedly coming), and much more public transit, but all in all, we doin' aaight.

Being part of NYC is just a nice bonus. :tup:

[NYguy]

Staten Island's beaches are nothing to rave about, and we could still use some more cultural institutions, maybe a more urban downtown area (which is supposedly coming), and much more public transit, but all in all, we doin' aaight.

Being part of NYC is just a nice bonus. :tup:

That's the spirit. Staten Island is at least the fastests growing borough (at last check), so that's something that could probably change things down the line. I do recall reading something about an art scene in SI, but it's not clear to me now. And there was the proposed NASCAR track in the borough - that would have been something unique for the city. But the NIMBYs were so against it, and the site is now being proposed as a shopping mall.

[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/arts/design/01whit.html?hp

Whitney’s Downtown Sanctuary

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
May 1, 2008


Optimism is in the air again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has just released a preliminary design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano for its proposed satellite museum downtown.

For more than 20 years the Whitney has been unveiling sunny expansion plans for its Marcel Breuer home on Madison Avenue, only to have them crash against the reality of neighborhood politics. With its decision to build a second museum in the meatpacking district, the Whitney seems to have found its bearings.

Mr. Piano’s project for a site on Gansevoort Street, west of Washington Street, is a striking departure from the ethereal glass creations that have made him a favorite of the art-world cognoscenti. Its bold chiseled form won’t appeal to those who prefer architecture to be unobtrusive.

Rising among the derelict warehouses and hip boutiques of the rapidly changing neighborhood, the museum’s monumental exterior forms are conceived as a barrier against the area’s increasingly amusement-park atmosphere. It makes a powerful statement about the encroaching effects of the global consumer society. Inside, Mr. Piano has created a contemplative sanctuary where art reasserts its primary place in the cultural hierarchy.

The feat is especially impressive given the obstacles Mr. Piano and the Whitney have overcome. After they spent years refining a proposed addition to the Breuer building, the museum abandoned that plan in 2006 (the third time that the museum had pulled out after commissioning a noted architect to design a major expansion). Then the idea of a satellite downtown raised concerns that the Whitney would abandon its Breuer building or that it could not afford to run two museums.

In a recent interview Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said the curators had yet to define the relationship between the two buildings. (One possibility is that the Breuer building will be used for exhibitions that focus on one aspect of the collection or a single artist, with the core of the collection relocated downtown.)

Mr. Piano’s design is certainly distinct from Breuer’s, presenting a strange, even forbidding aura. The building’s faceted surface seems hewed from a massive block of stone. Its main facade is slightly angled to make room for a small public plaza. The roof steps down in a series of big terraces on one side; on the other, it forms an impenetrable block facing the West Side Highway.

But as you study the form more intently, more layered meanings emerge. The stepped roof, for example, both supports a series of outdoor sculpture gardens and allows sunlight to spill down onto the High Line, the elevated rail bed that is being converted into a public garden. The angle of the facade allows people walking along the High Line to catch glimpses of the Hudson River down Gansevoort Street.

The feeling of a structure being carved apart to facilitate the flow of light and movement is magnified at ground level. Part of the structure rests on a glass base that houses a bookstore and cafe, so that you feel the full weight of the building bearing down. The underbelly of the building tilts up at one end, providing shade for the plaza and adding a sense of compression as you approach the entry.

This experience abruptly changes as you cross the threshold, for a window at the back of the lobby opens onto a view of the water and the height of the lobby space suddenly lets you breathe again. From there elevators whisk you up to the auditorium, library and galleries.

The new museum will have 50,000 square feet of gallery space, compared with 32,000 uptown. The third-floor gallery, at 17,500 square feet, will be the largest column-free space for viewing art in Manhattan, Mr. Weinberg said.

Mr. Piano plans to use a weblike structure of delicate steel, glass and fabric scrims for the roof on the top-floor gallery: the kind of intricate lighting system he has created before, in projects like the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Because the galleries are on multiple levels, visitors can experience the drama of climbing from darkness into light as they proceed through the floors.

The contrast between the muscularity of the exterior and the refinement of the interior brings to mind other recent designs, including Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Each of these projects offer an enclave conceived as a refuge from the world outside.

But in this case Mr. Piano is also offering a gentle critique of Breuer’s fortresslike vision for the Whitney. Like Breuer’s 1966 design, Mr. Piano’s building is a temple to culture; but here the relationship between inside and out — high art and the marketplace — is more fluid.

The design is preliminary, and needs more work. The weblike roof system, for example, is nothing more than a concept at this point. Mr. Piano is toying with the notion of bringing daylight into the lower-floor galleries — as the Sanaa design did for the recently opened New Museum on the Bowery — which is possible here because of the terraced roof.

Just as important to the outcome of the design, however, is Mr. Piano’s approach to New York’s evolving cultural scene. He and Mr. Weinberg refer to the downtown site as a return to the museum’s roots, because Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s original museum opened on West Eighth Street. But unlike 1930s Greenwich Village, the meatpacking district is more shopping mall than vibrant art scene. So one of Mr. Piano’s most delicate tasks will be to balance a spirit of openness with an instinct for self-preservation.

He has wisely decided not to link the building directly to the High Line, forcing visitors to climb down to street level before entering the museum across the plaza. Yet other key issues are less resolved. The building’s chiseled aesthetic could be pushed a bit further, becoming more animated. The relationship between the lobby and the upper floors is still clunky.

And there is the issue of material. At a meeting last month Mr. Piano, who often uses the metaphor of a ship in dry dock when talking about the satellite museum, said he was leaning toward a steel frame structure covered in welded steel plates, an idea that may be a holdover from his abandoned design for the uptown expansion. But the massive form of the downtown design suggests a building drawn from a single block rather than one built of individual structural pieces.

That image would probably be strengthened by cladding the building in a stone compound. A concrete exterior could also form a psychological bridge between the new museum and the Breuer building, making a trip downtown feel more like a homecoming.

Mr. Piano certainly has the skill to resolve these issues. Meanwhile he has laid the groundwork for a serious work of architecture. The bold form expresses a level of experimental courage that he hasn’t shown in years. It represents his willingness to move forward without betraying his faith in historical continuity. This is a building that could revive the Whitney, and inject welcome creative energy into the city’s cultural life.

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[NYguy]

More renderings of the new Whitney from curbed.com


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[NYC2ATX]

That's the spirit. Staten Island is at least the fastests growing borough (at last check), so that's something that could probably change things down the line. I do recall reading something about an art scene in SI, but it's not clear to me now. And there was the proposed NASCAR track in the borough - that would have been something unique for the city. But the NIMBYs were so against it, and the site is now being proposed as a shopping mall.

Yea, I'm aware of what happened with the NASCAR track, it's pretty pukey. You have no idea, the NIMBYs in S.I. are ten times worse than anywhere else. Shit doesn't get built at all here, unless it's an ugly townhouse development that's poorly planned and crawling with permit loopholes.

An art scene? Maybe. We have a mildly thriving-ish Indie music scene (Ingrid Michaelson anyone?), but an actual art museum would be nice.

P.S. The Whitney's lookin' hot. That neighborhood...I can't...
It's gonna be so different there in like 5-10 years. :)

[NYguy]

http://downtownexpress.com/de_261/sportsmuseumlooks.html

Sports Museum looks for a hit on Broadway


By Julie Shapiro
May 2-8, 2008


Listening to Philip Schwalb talk about sports is a lot like listening to an art collector talk about rare paintings.

“It takes people away from the mundane and the everyday,” Schwalb said. “They get to participate in or watch something really beautiful…. It allows for a feeling of transcendence.”

Schwalb, founder of a soon-to-open sports museum in Lower Manhattan, thinks sports are just as beautiful as music or art — but until now, there has never been a national museum celebrating athletes.

That will change on May 7, when Schwalb opens the doors of the Sports Museum of America at 26 Broadway. The museum will feature the history and achievements of athletes in 30 sports, ranging from football, basketball and hockey to bowling, fishing, rugby and lacrosse.

The museum will host a dedication ceremony outside at the base of the Canyon of Heroes next Tues., May 6 at noon. Forty famous athletes will attend the dedication, including Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who paraded up the Canyon earlier this year, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, ex-Rangers Rod Gilbert and Mike Richter, Mario Andretti, retired Dallas Cowboy Tony Dorsett, Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug and track-and-field Olympian Carl Lewis.

The museum’s galleries will showcase 600 sports artifacts, 1,100 photographs and 20 original films. Fans will be able to see Michael Jordan’s No. 9 “Dream Team” jersey from the 1992 Olympics and a boxing glove signed by both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier after they fought at Madison Square Garden in 1973. Schwalb devoted one gallery to breaking barriers of race, gender and nationality in sports.

The galleries for each sport will have three main components: videos, interactive computer programs and artifacts. In the baseball room, visitors will look into a periscope and at the touch of a button they’ll pull up videos of famous moments from baseball history, along with facts about what happened. Then, visitors can look at artifacts from the sport’s most famous players: Joe DiMaggio’s bat, Willie Mays’s glove, a World Series trophy and dozens of World Series rings.

The sports rooms will also have what Schwalb calls “touchables.”

“We didn’t want to create a museum where everything is behind glass,” he said.

Kids can take practice swings with Alex Rodriguez’s bat or shoot with Wayne Gretzky’s hockey stick. The close contact with famous athletes will be “irreplaceable,” Schwalb said — but he estimates that the museum will have to replace the artifacts themselves every six months because of general wear and tear. Luckily, he has a long list of athletes signed up who are eager to donate.

The museum will also house the original Heisman Trophy, given each year to the country’s best college football player. From its inception in 1935 until 2001, the Heisman Trophy had a home a few blocks away at the Downtown Athletic Club, at 19 West St, and the club hosted a ceremony each year to present the new trophy. After 9/11, the Downtown Athletic Club closed and the ceremony moved to Midtown.

Schwalb built a whole gallery devoted to the Heisman Trophy, where visitors will be able to see and touch the 1935 original. Portraits of past winners will line the walls. Each year, the Sports Museum of America will host the trophy presentation ceremony, a televised event that draws the nation’s best college football players.

The museum is located at the southern tip of Manhattan, on the first three floors of 26 Broadway, the landmarked Standard Oil building.

“The location couldn’t be better,” Schwalb said. The building’s windows overlook the Canyon of Heroes, where triumphant athletes have marched in parades for nearly 100 years — most recently when the Giants won the Super Bowl this year. The museum will open 45,000 square feet of space next week, including 4,000 square feet of retail for sports merchandise and memorabilia and an 8,000-square-foot venue for special events. The museum hopes to eventually open an additional 25,000 square feet of space, possibly for a café or a theater.

Within America’s first national sports museum, Schwalb also built a gallery devoted to another first: the first women’s hall of fame.

Billie Jean King, the tennis player who defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” founded the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, but it has never had a permanent home. Visitors to the hall of fame’s gallery in the Sports Museum will learn about inductees through interactive computer programs.

In June, the women’s hall of fame will hold an induction ceremony at the museum for exceptional female coaches and athletes.

Schwalb thought up the idea for the Sports Museum on Sept. 10, 2001, his 39th birthday. He was on an Amtrak train, returning from a trip up to Springfield, Mass. to see the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. A self-described “huge basketball fan,” Schwalb was disappointed to see only a handful of people in the two days he spent at the museum.

Then he realized that even as a longtime basketball fan, he had never been to the Basketball Hall of Fame before, mainly because of its location. Other halls of fame lie scattered throughout the country — like the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., or the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. — but their locations prevent them from attracting more visitors and gaining wider renown.

“People just don’t know about them,” Schwalb said.

So Schwalb had an idea: Why not combine the highlights of all the sports halls of fame under one roof, and put that roof in the heart of the biggest city in the country?

“Wouldn’t people just love that?” Schwalb remembered thinking, excited about his brainstorm.

The next day was 9/11, putting all such thoughts on hold.

But in the days and weeks that followed, as Schwalb heard politicians and community leaders call for rebuilding Downtown, he decided what his piece would be: America’s first national sports museum. He wanted to celebrate the beauty and grandeur of sports, while at the same time adding a new attraction to draw people to Lower Manhattan.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. signed on to his idea in May 2002, and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff added his support several months later. Springfield’s Basketball Hall of Fame was the first sports partner to join Schwalb in 2003, and other supporters soon poured in. Then Schwalb received $52 million in tax-free Liberty Bonds, just over half of the $100 million he needed to raise. Another $5 million came from taxable bonds and he raised the rest from private donations, which include personal contributions from the leaders of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

The museum is now partnered with 62 sports organizations, including every single sports hall of fame in the country.

Schwalb does not see his museum as competition for the many halls of fame, but envisions a mutually beneficial relationship. After years of conversations, the halls of fame agreed to loan artifacts for Schwalb to display, providing about 80 percent of the exhibits. In return, Schwalb has earmarked $2.5 million annually for the other museums. He also plugs the halls of fame in an exhibit called the “Hall of Halls,” which tells visitors where to travel for a more in-depth look at any given sport.

The Sports Museum of America faced several delays in opening, as Schwalb worked to get funding and exhibits in place.

As Schwalb developed the exhibits, he wanted to add more sophisticated interactive features, which took time.

One example is in the hockey gallery, an exhibit that Schwalb calls the “goalie’s nightmare.” Visitors put on what looks like a goalie’s mask but is actually fitted out with a virtual reality video screen. The museum spent months with the New York Rangers, sticking tiny cameras on the goalie and recording real footage of pucks speeding toward him at 120 miles per hour. Safe and warm in the museum, visitors will have nearly the same experience that professional goalies have on the ice.

“It’ll really blow people away,” Schwalb said. “That’s our goal: to let you feel and see and touch things you wouldn’t ordinarily see.”

The ticket prices are steep — $27 for an adult — reflecting the expense of creating and maintaining such high-tech exhibits.

The museum’s leaders expect to draw 1 million visitors in the first year, about half of them from the New York metro area. School groups will provide a lot of traffic — in fact, the first members of the public to see the completed museum will be a group of 1,000 New York City school teachers.

Schwalb also hopes to tap into New York’s 46 million yearly visitors. He imagines that a trip to the Sports Museum will round out a tourist’s visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Visitors will see the museum’s 24-foot-high windows as they exit the ferries and head north from Battery Park.

Schwalb considers himself more of a sports fan than a player, though he has coached basketball for the Jewish Community Center and the YMCA. Attending Duke University cemented his love of basketball, and growing up with two parents from New York made him a diehard Mets fan. Just last week, Schwalb threw the first pitch at Shea stadium, an experience he calls “mind-blowing.”

Schwalb admits a slight bias at the museum toward New York’s home sports teams.

“Our first obligation as the nation’s first museum of sports was to do a good and fair job covering all sports and teams,” Schwalb said. “We needed to be impartial, but it was kind of difficult.” The museum has extra artifacts from the Mets, Yankees, Jets, Giants and Rangers. “If you’re a New York fan, you’ll be a little happier,” Schwalb added.

Admission will be $27 for adults ages 15 to 59, $24 for students and seniors, $20 for children 4 to 14 and free for children under 4. Starting May 7, the museum is open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The tickets are timed, and the last ones are sold 90 minutes before closing.

[NYguy]

http://www.tribecatrib.com/news/newsjuly08/hangar17.html

Remnants Await Return to WTC Site

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By Carl Glassman
POSTED JUNE 27, 2008


It will be another three years before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum opens at the World Trade Center site. But for the museum’s curators, the monumental task of composing the 9/11 story is now.

Chief curator Jan Ramirez and associate curator Amy Weinstein are gathering the photos, films, oral histories and personal mementos for the permanent collection. But it is the massive artifacts —the rusted and twisted tonnage of World Trade Center steel and the wreckage of emergency vehicles, for example—that will influence design and engineering decisions before the museum is built.

Those objects, including a pair of structural steel “tridents” from the towers and the 65-ton “Last Column,” are among a thousand World Trade Center remnants cleaned and stored neatly in Hangar 17 at JFK Airport. Within two weeks after the disaster, the former Tower Air hangar had become a repository of massive Trade Center rubble, some of which will be selected for posterity.

Last month, a Trib reporter accompanied Ramirez on a tour of the 80,000- square-foot hangar, where she talked about objects being considered for the museum—decisions that will influence how generations of visitors try to comprehend the enormity of physical loss on Sept. 11.

Only a few of the mangled vehicles in the collection can return to the site. Among those might be Engine 21, which had been parked at Church and Vesey Streets when the towers came down. Ramirez said that the truck’s cab, a burned-out wreckage, and its rear section nearly intact, is a potent symbol of the “quirk of fate” that day.

“If you turned left you might have lived, if you turned right you might have died,” she said.

Ramirez and Weinstein are on a quest to find the people and stories behind the objects. For Engine 21, it is the last hours of William Burke, the revered fire captain who drove the truck to the scene that day. He perished on the 24th floor of the north tower after choosing to stay with two workers—one a paraplegic—though he knew the south tower had collapsed and the north tower was next.

A Ladder 3 truck that had been parked on West Street, its cab missing, also is likely to be displayed in the museum, Ramirez said. One of Ladder 3’s men was the highly decorated fire captain, Patrick J. “Paddy” Brown.

“We actually have recordings of his voice. We know he got up as high as probably the 43rd floor of the north tower,” said Ramirez. “He heard the evacuation order but stayed to make sure all the civilians were out. He was killed when the building came down.”

“You have to be careful how you use the word hero,” Ramirez noted, “and we probably will not use that word. But there were incredible choices that were made that day.”

Some surviving crew members of other vehicles in the hangar are still too traumatized to tell their stories, Ramirez said. Such is the case with two men who arrived in an EMS ambulance.

Gutted by fire, the vehicle’s ash-filled interior could be misperceived as harboring WTC dust, Ramirez said, so the ambulance will probably be one of the few objects encased in glass.

Just how the museum avoids displaying artifacts of destruction as perverse objects of sculptural art is still an open question, Ramirez said.

“We want to make sure that we do not aestheticize moments in which everything became so twisted or scratched that it becomes almost luridly beautiful,” she said. “We’re going to avoid using traditional museum mounts and, to the best of our abilities, we’re going to keep the mounts very humble. We’re not presenting them as fetishized objects.”

The few fragmented remains of Broken Propeller, the Alexander Calder sculpture that stood at the World Trade Center, lie pitifully on a line-up of tables within a “microclimate” tent of their own. Ramirez said the museum may bring the pieces back into a “silhouette ensemble placement” that does not pretend to create a new work of art.

The display of the “Last Column” offers other challenges, Ramirez said. The 36-foot girder, with its hundreds of photos and messages of grief and remembrance, is preserved in its own climate-controlled tent. There, preservationists Steven Weinstein and Peter Gat continue their years-long effort to halt the corrosion it suffered at Ground Zero.

But the famous totem probably can not be housed in the same controlled environment at the museum, where it will be displayed in a large area next to the exposed slurry wall.

“Do we have visitors actually go into a chamber where they can encounter it, do we enclose the column?” Ramirez asks. “We’re still thinking about a variety of options.”

The curators are tracking down many of the people who inscribed messages on the column in an effort to collect their stories.

Working with the museum’s design consultants, they are considering creating a touch screen on which visitors can scroll up and down a computer-generated facsimile of the column, touching on images or numbers or agency markings that will bring up an oral history or slide show.

“There is so much rich history to all of this,” she said.

It is undecided what will become of the boulder-like composite of concrete and rebar that now resides like a quarantined patient in a room of its own. It is several unknown floors of a tower compressed into a layered mass less than four feet high. It is so emotionally charged—family members differ on whether it should be exhibited—that Ramirez asked that it not be photographed.

“We’ve had the medical examiner come out and they said if there happened to be a person trapped there nothing would have survived at this heat, which they’ve estimated at about 2,800 degrees,” Ramirez said.

That object, like so many others in Hangar 17, will be the subject of much careful thought over the coming months.

“We’re just trying to think through every decision we make,” Ramirez said.

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[NYC4Life]

NY1

10/31/2008 11:51 AM

New MoMA Exhibit Explores A Different Side Of Miro

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Joan Miro may be one of the most recognizable artists of the 20th century. A new exhibit at Museum of Modern Art opening this weekend, shows a very different side of the artist. NY1's Stephanie Simon spoke with his grandson about the exhibit and filed the following report.

There are myriad sides to the Spanish artist Miro. There's the well-known lyrical painter seen in this work in the lobby of MoMA. There's the rebellious artist shown just a few floors up in this new exhibition called Juan Miro: Painting and Anti Painting.

Then there's the Miro that his grandson knew.

"He was a distant man," said grandson Joan Punyet Miro. "He was not normal. He was a very mystical creature."

Punyet Miro said his grandfather was inspired by everyday objects.
"Of course, he was going to restaurants. He was stealing napkins, putting it in his pocket, going to his sculpting studio the next morning, with the small napkin and creating a two-meter high bronze sculpture," said Punyet Miro.

Joan Punyet Miro was just 15 when his grandfather died in 1983. And while this new exhibit at MoMA shows a lesser known period of his grandfather's work, Punyet Miro calls it an important statement about him.

"Miro was the poet of pure and humble object," said the grandson. "He thought that the reason of life was living in the most insignificant objects in your everyday existence. So he took the napkin and the wishbone of a chicken and a normal napkin, whatever thing had an original shock for him and took it to the studio."

From 1927 to 1937, Miro created what he called Anti-Paintings. Curator Anne Umland says during that time Miro created radically-new art.

"Using flat, already-made, no shading of perspective depth, but contradictory indicators," said Umlad of his works. "He created a different sport of space by using distortions and unrealistic colors to change the notion of what a painting could be."

One of the many ways Miro rebelled against traditional painting was by signing his name on the back of the canvas, and once and awhile, hiding his signature within the painting.

The show is up now through January 12th.


Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/arts/design/26plan.html

Whitney Museum Plans New Building Downtown

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The site near the High Line in the meatpacking district where the Whitney Museum of American Art plans to break ground next year.

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By CAROL VOGEL
May 25, 2010

After 25 years of false starts, the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art has taken a step that will redefine the 80-year-old institution. It voted on Tuesday afternoon to begin construction on a building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015, that will vastly increase the size and scope of the museum.

The vote was unanimous. Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said after the meeting, “A year from now we will be breaking ground.”

...Without room to grow uptown, and without the income necessary to run two museums, the Whitney now faces the question of what to do with the Breuer building — which may end up being shared, at least temporarily, by another institution, perhaps the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The board met not at the museum, as it usually does, but in a conference room at the Standard Hotel on Washington Street, a block and a half from the new site. During the two-hour meeting, Leonard A. Lauder — the Whitney’s chairman emeritus and largest benefactor, and until now an opponent of the project — surprised everyone by voting in favor of the new building. Indeed, although there have been rumors for weeks that Mr. Lauder was considering resigning if the project went ahead, he spoke passionately in favor of it at the meeting.

“Downtown is a new city, a new nation. Why shouldn’t the Whitney be the museum of record there?” Mr. Lauder said in an interview.

He cited several reasons for his change of heart. In addition to the board’s having raised more money than was anticipated, and having done it more quickly, he said, “there is no better time to build than now, with construction costs and interest rates at an all-time low.”

“There is a new generation of people who have come on the board who are not rooted to the past,” Mr. Lauder said. “It would be unfair for someone like me who grew up near the Whitney to believe it should stay there.”


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http://worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=14068
Whitney Museum OKs new downtown facility

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The on-again, off-again decision to build a downtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art is back on again. The museum’s board voted Tuesday to begin construction of a new building in New York’s white-hot meatpacking district on a site next to the High Line entrance.

Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, which also designed the Whitney’s now-cancelled uptown expansion, in collaboration with Cooper, Robertson & Partners, the new $680 million museum is expected to break ground a year from now with completion in 2015.

In concert with its decision to build downtown, the museum will be selling a group of brownstones adjacent its Marcel Breuer-designed Madison Avenue building, virtually precluding future expansion there. No word yet as to what will become of the uptown building, except to say that the Whitney Board is currently in talks with The Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding that institution’s use of the Breuer building as it undergoes a major renovation of its own.

The downtown Whitney will be a six-storey, 195,000-square foot, metal-clad building featuring a dramatic cantilevered entrance. It will house more than 50,00 square feet of galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space together will classrooms, a research library, art conservation labs and multi-use indoor-outdoor space for film, video and performance art. It will also include a restaurant, café and bookstore.

Sharon McHugh

[NYguy]

http://downtownexpress.com/de_401/whitneyeyes.html

Whitney eyes spring groundbreak

By Albert Amateau
DEC. 29, 2010 - JAN. 5, 2011


The Whitney Museum’s executive director gave Community Board 2’s Institutions and Art Committee an updated look Monday at designs for the new museum planned for Gansevoort St. at the High Line’s south end.

Whitney Director Adam Weinberg said the museum was on track to acquire the city-owned site in early 2011, begin demolition of existing structures in February and hold an official groundbreaking on May 24.

Completion is expected in 2015, but Weinberg could not be more specific.

Although details like the exterior color of the Renzo Piano-designed museum have not yet been decided, Whitney executives said the museum’s highest elevation will now be 166 feet, a bit shorter than originally proposed.

Piano is also designing the High Line maintenance-and-operations building, which will connect to the elevated park but not to the museum. The “M & O” building should be completed by the same time as the museum, Weinberg said.

Members of the committee, chaired by David Gruber, waxed enthusiastic at the presentation of a new Whitney that will be returning to the neighborhood it left in 1930, when it moved from W. Eighth St. to the Upper East Side.

“This is the best project I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on the board,” said committee member David Reck.

[NYguy]

Wonderful Post !!!!!!! really its amazing information in this site ,I like it,,,,,,
well done..........:) :)

You are welcome.

[NYguy]

http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/new-museum-moving-image-crystalizes-astoria

Mayor Buys First Ticket to Shiny New Museum of the Moving Image

http://www.observer.com/files/full/Facade_0.jpg
The faceted facade of the new MOMI expansion


By Matt Chaban
January 13, 2011

L.A. may have Hollywood, but New York has the Museum of the Moving Image, the only institution in the country dedicated exclusively to the history of film. Not the movie stars and memorabilia, though the museum does that, too, but actual film.

MOMI just dedicated a new expansion that nearly doubles its size to 97,700 square feet, creating more room for its expansive archives as well as three new theaters in which to view all those films, videos, slides and broadcasts.

"From the days of Edison to the Internet, no force has done more than the moving image to transform the world, socially, culturally and economically," Moving Image Chairman Herbert S. Schlosser said in a release. "The one place where people can get an entertaining yet informed experience of this phenomenon as a whole is at our Museum. Now we have facilities that are as multifaceted and exciting as the stories that we tell."

The museum rolled out the red carpet for the city's political A-list at the dedication—though MOMI is run by a non-profit, the building is owned by the city, and $55 million of the $67 million expansion budget came from public sources, chiefly the city's Department of Cultural Affairs. Among those pausing for the paparazzi were Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, Congressman Joseph Crowley, Queens Councilman and Cultural Affairs Committee chair Jimmy Van Bramer, State Senator Michael Gianaris, Cultural Affairs commissioner Kate D. Levin, Thomas Leeser, the architect of the expansion, and, of course, Hizzoner.

“The museum’s state-of-the-art expansion in Astoria will allow it to provide new exhibition and screening space and the capacity to double the number of students that its education center serves," Mayor Bloomberg said. "It is an example of the kind of substantial investments we continue to make in New York City’s cultural institutions, which benefit New Yorkers and, last year, helped us attract a record number of visitors.”

The museum reopens to the public this Saturday.


______________________________


http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/slideshow/new-museum-moving-image-crystalizes-astoria

http://www.observer.com/files/slideshow_image/Door.jpg


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[SkyscrapersOfNewYork]

http://www.observer.com/2011/real-estate/new-museum-moving-image-crystalizes-astoria

Mayor Buys First Ticket to Shiny New Museum of the Moving Image

http://www.observer.com/files/full/Facade_0.jpg
The faceted facade of the new MOMI expansion


By Matt Chaban
January 13, 2011

where is this????

[NYguy]

where is this????

Queens.

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/images/2_MovingImageMap__2011__FOR_WEB.rev2_._lowres_.jpg
http://www.movingimage.us/visit/directions


http://www.movingimage.us/about/images/_LEESER_RearFacade_lowres.jpg

[SkyscrapersOfNewYork]

Queens.

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/images/2_MovingImageMap__2011__FOR_WEB.rev2_._lowres_.jpg
http://www.movingimage.us/visit/directions


http://www.movingimage.us/about/images/_LEESER_RearFacade_lowres.jpg

awwww thats a let down, it would have been nice near Lincoln Center or the Tribeca Film Festival theater...

[NYguy]

awwww thats a let down, it would have been nice near Lincoln Center or the Tribeca Film Festival theater...

There's a whole city out there my friend. Not everything can be in Manhattan, nor should it be.

[Obey]

awwww thats a let down, it would have been nice near Lincoln Center or the Tribeca Film Festival theater...

Why? :sly:

[tdawg]

This is actually in a very cool area of Long Island City. Plus, the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park are not too far away. Or the PS1 Contemporary Art Center.

[NYC4Life]

From the outside, the glass building resembles an arena.

[ThisSideofSteinway]

This is actually in a very cool area of Long Island City. Plus, the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park are not too far away. Or the PS1 Contemporary Art Center.

Not to mention Kaufman Astoria Studios next door (home to Sesame Street!).

[Obey]

I just visited the Museum of the Moving Image. Its awesome and worth checking out!

[NYguy]

Good news (despite some opinions) for the Intrepid.


http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/space-shuttle-to-land-in-manhattan/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Space Shuttle to Land in Manhattan

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/12/nyregion/CITYROOM-INTREPID/CITYROOM-INTREPID-blog480.jpg


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/13/nyregion/intrepid-cityroom/intrepid-cityroom-blog480.jpg

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum President Susan Marenoff-Zausner, holding Champagne, and other museum staff,
react to the announcement of NASA’s space shuttle Enterprise to be retired at Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

April 12, 2011
By PATRICK MCGEEHAN



A space shuttle is coming to Manhattan, but not one of the three that have carried astronauts into orbit.

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum is getting the fourth shuttle, the Enterprise, according to a person who had been briefed on the decision.

The Enterprise was the consolation prize in the contest to obtain one of the three orbiters that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to give away after wrapping up the Space Shuttle program. One of those three, the Discovery, has been promised to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It would be displayed at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, near Washington Dulles International Airport.

The Enterprise, which was the first shuttle built though it never flew into space, is currently on display there.

NASA’s administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., is scheduled to announce where the retired shuttles are going during a news conference in Florida on Tuesday afternoon.

Intrepid museum officials have said they plan to house the shuttle in a building they will construct on Pier 86, next to the decommissioned aircraft carrier that houses the museum. They have estimated that the shuttle could draw as many as a million sightseers to the city. To make room, the museum would probably have to move a retired Concorde supersonic jet that now sits on the end of the pier, which juts into the Hudson River.

Now comes the hard part: raising the money to pay for the Enterprise. The space agency’s latest estimate of the cost of preparing and delivering one of the used shuttles was $28.8 million; the Enterprise, which is already on display, should require less work. Intrepid officials have not yet identified any sources of funds for the project and city officials have indicated to them that the city is in no position to offer much financial assistance.

New York’s two senators, Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, lobbied hard for New York City to get one of the shuttles. But they were in a fierce competition with elected officials from several other states, including Florida, Texas, Ohio and Washington.





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http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/04/12/photos-new-york-lands-nasas-enterprisetabslidesho/

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-NM363_0412en_F_20110412142927.jpg

The prototype space shuttle Enterprise flies over New York on June 10, 1983, on its return trip from Europe. The shuttle was mounted atop a Boeing 747.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/04/12/photos-new-york-lands-nasas-enterprisetabslidesho/tab/slideshow/

[NYguy]

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2011/04/13/2011-04-13_queens_museum_of_art_starts_expansion_plan_to_double_space_by_2013.html#ixzz1JPstI4Dx

Queens Museum of Art starts expansion plan to double space by 2013

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2011/04/13/alg_queens-museum-groundbreaking.jpg

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Queens Museum of Art Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl (to his right) join other city officials kicking off the expansion project Tuesday.

BY Nicholas Hirshon
April 13th 2011



The Queens Museum of Art formally kicked off a massive expansion Tuesday to double its size by 2013, marking yet another transformation of a World's Fair relic.

Amid the hum of construction, Mayor Bloomberg said that breaking ground on the 50,000-square-foot space with other elected officials was a "highlight."

The long-awaited, $65 million project will allow more space for galleries and events. Plans also call for a new café and gift shop.

"This really is a wise investment in our city's future," Bloomberg said.

After donning a hardhat and shoveling dirt for the cameras, Borough President Helen Marshall gushed that the expansion will be "absolutely spectacular."

"We're all experiencing history," she said. "It's a privilege for all of us to be here and witness it."

The institution for years shared its building - a remnant of both the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs and one-time home to the United Nations - with an ice-skating rink.

The rink relocated a few years ago, clearing the way for the museum's expansion into the other half of the New York City Building.

To make the museum more visible from the Grand Central Parkway, crews will relocate trees that line the structure's western side.

It's just the latest in decades of renovations for the former pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, which boasted the futuristic theme, "Building the World of Tomorrow."

"Yet again, that is precisely what the Queens Museum is doing - building our 'world of tomorrow,' " said museum President Gretchen Werwaiss.

The museum's chairman, Alan Suna, who is also CEO of Silvercup Studios, said the expansion will make the space "the pride of Queens."

Bloomberg said the expanded museum will become a stop for locals and tourists in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

"Cultural institutions are also for people who live right here, for us," he told the crowd, which included a local school group.

[NYguy]

Images for the expansion...


http://www.queensmuseum.org/about/building-expansion

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[NYguy]

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/2011/04/14/nyc-shouldnt-have-won-a-space-shuttle-discover/

NYC shouldn’t have won a space shuttle (Discover)

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/files/2011/04/intrepid.jpg

A depiction of the New York Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's proposed space shuttle orbiter gallery

Aubrey Cohen

...Sure, New York is the biggest city in the country. But the shuttle Discovery was already slated to go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which is just four hours away, in Washington, D.C. And New York’s Intrepid Sea Air & Space Museum, which will get the atmospheric test shuttle Enterprise, is not widely respected.

Take Phil Plait, the astronomer who writes Discovery’s Bad Astronomy blog.

“(T)he Intrepid museum in NYC is a bit of a head-scratcher,” he wrote Wednesday. “(W)hile the museum does get a lot of visitors, I’m wondering why the Johnson Space Center in Houston didn’t get an Orbiter. That seems like a more natural choice, especially given that three of the Orbiters wound up on the east coast.”

People generally seem more accepting of the choices of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as the home for Atlantis and the California Science Center, in Los Angeles, for Endeavour.

The fact that Intrepid is getting the shuttle that didn’t fly in space would seem an indication that it was the lowest-ranking of the winners. But it still beat out all the other candidates, including every non-coastal site.

Many comments on Plait’s post mirrored his take, but in stronger words, including: “NYC makes no sense,” “it’s a travesty” and “the middle of the country got hosed.”

But New York also had its defenders, with comments such as: “the top tourist destination in the US is New York for both foreign and domestic tourists,” “far more people will see the shuttle in New York, and that’s really the point of sending them to museums” and “More people will see the Enterprise in a year in NYC than in a decade if it were sitting in Houston.”

[NYguy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/nyregion/plans-to-build-museum-opposite-intrepid-to-house-enterprise.html?ref=nyregion

After Winning Coveted Shuttle, Museum Changes the Plan for It

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/29/nyregion/INTREPID1/INTREPID1-articleLarge.jpg
Officials hope to build a museum to house the shuttle Enterprise on a parking lot opposite the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
The new plan faces several obstacles, and one lawmaker says NASA may have to revisit its selection process.

By PATRICK McGEEHAN
September 28, 2011

...five months after the Intrepid was awarded the shuttle Enterprise, museum officials have turned their attention from the end of the newly revamped pier to a parking lot on 12th Avenue, across the cacophonous West Side Highway. They envision converting the lot, which is surrounded by H & H Bagels, a car wash, storage warehouses and a strip club, into a space-themed museum that would serve as the home of the Enterprise and draw as many as one million visitors a year.

The museum’s president, Susan Marenoff-Zausner, said in an interview that she envisioned a museum “with the shuttle as the primary tenant” but also with classrooms and laboratories for teaching schoolchildren and others about science and technology. “It would be a museum on that side of the highway, which we think could be a linchpin in beautifying the area,” she said.




http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/29/nyregion/INTREPID2/INTREPID2-popup.jpg
The Enterprise in 2003 at a Smithsonian Institution center in Virginia. The shuttle is scheduled to move to New York next year.

[NYguy]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/an_nyc_space_hub_aPa5GtTuoEPPZ05dUtf44J?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=

An NYC space hub

http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2011/10/27/oped/web_photos/27.1o027.brodskyc--300x300.jpg

Spectacular: A grand exhibit hall for the Enterprise shuttle, built across the street from the Intrepid,
would make the city home to the most important space museum in the Northeast.


By ADAM BRODSKY
October 26, 2011

Last April, New York City won a snazzy prize. Amid fierce competition, NASA chose the Intrepid Museum on the Hudson as the home for the space shuttle Enterprise. Now the price of poker has gone up: Museum officials want to build a grand annex to house the bird, along with a beefed-up space and science program.

What a tremendous cultural and educational boon for the city. We’d finally have our own premier space-and-science center. How cool is that?

But the hurdles are huge. If New Yorkers want to see the plan become reality, they’ll need to get behind it quickly and aggressively, and make sure the opportunity doesn’t slip by.

On the drawing board: a spectacular 75,000-square-foot glass structure on what is now a parking lot across 12th Avenue, near the museum’s home aboard USS Intrepid -- the storied World War II-era aircraft carrier docked at Pier 86 near West 46th Street. The shuttle would be the main attraction, but the building would also offer other exhibits, interactive displays, classrooms and labs for educational programs, a rooftop cafe and other amenities.

[NYguy]

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/139345753

Whitney Downtown Breaks Ground, Drives Piles

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/_DSC8746fs-thumb.jpg


Wednesday, November 2, 2011, by Kelsey Keith

With no ceremonial drums or interactive flythroughs in sight, the Whitney Museum's downtown outpost is digging in to its Meatpacking District lot. The groundbreaking was back in May; now, slowly but surely, the Renzo Piano-designed structure is getting comfortable with some "dewatering, some excavation, a smattering of underpinning, and lots of pile driving to prep the site before the ground gets too cold." This, according to roving photographer Tim Schenck who stopped by to check out the progress.



http://timothyschenck.blogspot.com/2011/10/whitney-museum-site-work.html

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http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VhbwmpLhunY/Tq7C4HDEbvI/AAAAAAAACEg/MZCgJyyxO_U/s1600/_DSC8793fs.jpg

[NYguy]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203804204577014441361935340.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
West Side's Museum Mile

November 3, 2011
By JENNIFER MALONEY


The first lease for the Hudson Yards project is breathing life into another idea: A new space for arts and culture on the site that, along with the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District, would bookend what is envisioned as a kind of Museum Mile for the West Side. City officials say they are planning a Hudson Yards arts center that serves as a blank canvas. It could simultaneously host theater performances, traveling exhibitions and community events on different floors—or the entire space could be marshaled to stage one large show.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that the center, which has been part of the project's plans since its 2005 inception, will become the home of Fashion Week. "This would add a great deal to New York's ability to have big events and keep the industries that are coming here growing," he said while announcing that Coach Inc. plans to be the first tenant in an office tower built by Related Cos.

If the plan comes to fruition, people will be able to stroll along the High Line from the Whitney, stop at a few Chelsea galleries and continue to the Culture Shed, a space that city officials say would showcase not just art, but fashion and industrial design.

City officials cautioned that the Culture Shed is still in its infancy. Officials, who are shepherding the idea but won't run the center, said they hope to have a clearer plan by next summer for the building's design, the money required to build it and the shape of the nonprofit organization that will lead it. The design, by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, in partnership with the Rockwell Group, is still under development. An early rendering showed a five-story building with a footprint of 22,000 square feet, couched in two outer shells that could be rolled outward to expand the space to more than 55,000 square feet.

[yankeesfan1000]

Didn't know where else to put this, but it looks incredible.

ZOMG, Could This Be New York City's Space Shuttle Museum? (http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/11/04/zomg_could_this_be_new_york_citys_space_shuttle_museum.php)
Friday, November 4, 2011, by Kelsey Keith

"...The 75,000 square foot space would have the shuttle at its center, plus classrooms, laboratories, a theater and rooftop restaurant. Intrepid President Susan Marenoff-Zausner said that as of a projected opening in 2014, the museum expects "300,000 additional visitors per year, 1,186 new jobs, and will generate about $143 million-a-year in revenue."

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/space%20shuttle%20museum%20exterior-thumb.jpg

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/space%20shuttle%20museum%201-thumb.jpg

[NYguy]

^ I like it, and imagine it will only be more impressive at night.

[NYC4Life]

I would be among the first in line to get inside this museum, looks amazing.

[NYguy]

Video tour of the planned new Whitney...
http://www.observer.com/2012/01/a-headspinning-video-tour-of-the-new-whitney/

[aquablue]

I suppose the industrial/factory feel of this building is supposed to fit in with the context of the area. I'm not too happy with the design though, it is rather industrial looking. Renzo could have done much better of course.

[NYguy]

http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5865

Long Live Queens
Ten years from start, Queens Museum of Art back on track.


http://archpaper.com/uploads/image/queens_museum_01.jpg


Tom Stoelker
1/31/2012



Designed by Robert Moses’ man Aymar Embury II for the 1939 World’s Fair, the building once housed an ice skating rink in half its vast column-free hall; the rink was moved out as part of the failed 2012 Olympic bid, allowing the museum to expand within its own walls from 50,000 to 100,000 feet. In 2003, Eric Owen Moss won New York City’s first Design Excellence competition to develop an iconic design for the space. Moss’ proposed slumped-glass entry addition would have wiped out the central section of the original building, and in 2005 it was scrapped. At the time, the museum’s executive director Tom Finkelpearl told AN that “things weren’t clicking.” One year later, a new design by Grimshaw emerged, embracing the original art deco-inspired structure.

The designs released in 2006 responded to a need to catch the attention of 250,000 Grand Central Parkway commuters while incorporating two formal entryways. The entrance facing Flushing Meadows Park maintained Embury’s classical colonnade, while the entrance facing Grand Central Parkway placed an illuminated glass curtain wall in front of the columns. Original designs included the name of the museum translated into scores of languages and etched onto the glass. It also incorporated a floor-to-ceiling arched glass dividing wall in the interior that would have disrupted Embury’s column-free 115-foot arched truss. Both elements have been altered.

Inside, the truss will flow free of disruption. “We’ll be able to do large-scale installations like no other museum in America,” said Finkelpearl. A small skylight above the central lobby and a larger one to the south between two galleries feature baffles that direct light downward, while a series of angled glass panels—50 percent transparent—frame the skylight. Each row of hanging glass panels follows the rectangular form of the skylights before dropping down and shifting in angle so as to block and direct natural light.

The most important design element is at the western facade. A sand-blasted dot graphic runs up the glass, becoming less dense toward the top. At night, the dot finish will be kinetically lit by LEDs programmed by a guest artist. Metal halide lights will wash over a vertical metal mesh that runs perpendicular to the glass, and a two-tone metallic finish will form letters that read “Queens” when viewed from the north and “Museum” when viewed from the south.




http://archpaper.com/uploads/queens_museum_02.jpg



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[yankeesfan1000]

Metropolitan Musem of Art Finally Plans New Fifth Ave Plaza
(http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2012/02/08/metropolitan_musem_of_art_finally_plans_new_fifth_ave_plaza.php)
Wednesday, February 8, 2012, by Sara Polsky

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/metrender.jpg

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/metrender2_2_12-thumb.jpg

"The crowded and, well, blah plaza outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art is headed for a makeover, now that museum trustee and philanthropist David H. Koch has promised $60 million for the project. The Times has the details on the redo, which could begin this fall if various city departments give the thumbs-up. The plan from Philly-based firm OLIN involves smaller fountains—"programmed by computer to provide a variety of water patterns during the warm months"—which will become reflecting pools in winter. The revamped plaza will have double the current number of trees, including some topiaries; benches and retractable parasols; bronze kiosks for information and food; spots for street vendors; and night-time LED lighting. That all sounds fun, and the rendering above gives only a partial view."

[NYguy]

^ Larger view of the plaza rendering...

http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=18896


http://static.worldarchitecturenews.com/news_images/18896_1_met.jpg

[NYguy]

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/32201

BREAKING: HWKN Wins 2012 PS 1 Young Architects Program

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/HWKN_ps1_2012_02.jpg


February 8, 2012
Alan G. Brake



New York-based HWKN has been selected for this year’s MoMA/PS 1 Young Architects Program. Their proposal, called “Wendy,” uses standard scaffolding to create a visually arresting object that straddles the three outdoor rooms of the PS 1 courtyard. Tensioned fabric coated in smog-eating paint provides shelter and programming areas including a stage, shower, and misters. “Their proposal is quite attractive in a number of ways. It’s very economical in terms of design,” said Pedro Gadanho, the curator of contemporary architecture at MoMA. “One object creates a variety of programmatic and ecological conditions and its scale rivals the height of the PS 1 building.”

All the materials can be disassembled and reused, and according to Gadanho, the jury was particularly impressed with the combination of standardized parts (the scaffolding) and cutting edge technology (the smog-eating coating). “It’s pro-active, it’s not apologetic,” he said. “It begins to point to a new way to think about sustainability.” The designers, led by principals Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner and project architect Robert May, estimate the fabric will remove as much smog as taking 250 cars off the road. The pavilion will open in late June.





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_______________________________________________



More images from the Observer...
http://www.observer.com/2012/02/spiking-queens-a-sharp-pavilion-for-ps1-this-summer/#slide2


http://www.observer.com/files/2012/02/Screen-Shot-2012-02-09-at-10.54.59-AM-600x359.png



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http://www.observer.com/files/2012/02/Screen-Shot-2012-02-09-at-10.56.25-AM-600x354.png

[NYguy]

Metropolitan Musem of Art Finally Plans New Fifth Ave Plaza
(http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2012/02/08/metropolitan_musem_of_art_finally_plans_new_fifth_ave_plaza.php)
Wednesday, February 8, 2012, by Sara Polsky

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/metrender.jpg

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/metrender2_2_12-thumb.jpg




Time for some NIMBYism...


http://www.dnainfo.com/20120214/upper-east-side/met-museums-60m-plaza-would-be-unwelcome-hangout-neighbors-say
Met Museum's $60M Plaza Would Be an Unwelcome 'Hangout,' Neighbors Say

http://assets.dnainfo.com/generated/photo/2012/02/1329195578.jpg/image640x480.jpg

February 14, 2012
By Amy Zimmer



Grand plans for a multi-million dollar plaza stretching four blocks outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art have angered Upper East Siders — who fear the creation of a Fifth Avenue “hangout.” The major overhaul of the tourist-crammed spot beside Central Park includes the creation of seating areas with 400 chairs and 100 tables scattered under new trees and umbrellas for shade. But, instead of a vision of European-style splendor, the plaza’s well-heeled neighbors see it as little more than a huge gathering spot. “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Community Board 8 member Peggy Price said. “This is a neighborhood, not a place to hang out.”

The new seating will help redirect traffic from the museum’s steps, which are a popular spot for tourists to sit as thousands more try to get in and out of the 82nd Street entrance, the Met’s director and CEO Thomas Campbell said at the board’s landmarks committee meeting Monday night.

Residents also criticized the Met's plans to build a kiosk in the plaza to sell tickets and another to sell refreshments. They were chagrined to learn that the street vendors selling art and food would have designated spots after the renovation.

"We don’t really need ticket vending outside the museum in that gorgeous plaza you’re going to create," said Paul Whitby, who lives across the street from the Met. "I think this is going to be a windfall for the food vendors,” community board member Michele Birnbaum said. She also thought it would be a boon to Madison Avenue delis that sell picnic lunches to park-goers. "I think if you’re providing additional seating for 400 people," she said. "I think it will be a picnic destination.”

The Met needs various city approvals, including from the Public Design Commission, before it can move forward on the 23 month-long construction. Museum officials are seeking the commission's final approval by July, and are hoping to start work in the fall.


http://assets.dnainfo.com/generated/photo/2011/12/1323438927.jpg/image640x480.jpg


http://assets.dnainfo.com/generated/photo/2012/02/1328662906.jpg/image640x480.jpg

[NYguy]

Some Whitney Museum expansion photos from Vin Schiano (http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinschiano/sets/72157629421719717/)

Check the gallery.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7067/6918061339_82d654511f_b.jpg



http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7204/6801199650_0293014988_b.jpg

[J. Will]

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Community Board 8 member Peggy Price said. “This is a neighborhood, not a place to hang out.”

Yes, because one should never hang out in a neighbourhood. Fucking NIMBYs.

[NYguy]

Yes, because one should never hang out in a neighbourhood. Fucking NIMBYs.

LOL, in classic nimbyism, they just want the place to themselves.

[NYguy]

Another look at the latest addition to the Queens Museum...

(Updating the Panorama)


Queens Museum (http://www.flickr.com/photos/panoramaqueensmuseum/)

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7036/6796004406_df4e82611f_b.jpg



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[CarlosV]

^^^
they need to replace the Twin towers.....

[NYguy]

^^^
they need to replace the Twin towers.....

They will after the new WTC is complete.

[yankeesfan1000]

Great news!!!

Looks Like All Systems Go for Space Shuttle Museum (http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/20/looks_like_all_systems_go_for_space_shuttle_museum.php#4f68b9e485216d4211015d0b)
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, by Dave Hogarty

"Ground crews are doing preliminary flight check before the takeoff of Enterprise Museum construction."

http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/4f68b9ea85216d416d01164a/untitled-1024-4.jpg

[sask1982]

They will after the new WTC is complete.

Interesting that they removed the Deutsche Bank, and added Goldman Sachs HQ (200 West St), but they haven't added 7WTC, completed long b4 200 West or DB's demo was completed.

[DesignerVoodoo]

This is an update from NASA about the delivery/fly over of Enterprise. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/transition/home/enterprise_flight_postponed.html

[NYguy]

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/04/space_shuttle_enterprises_new.html

Space shuttle Enterprise's New York flyover postponed by rain

http://media.nj.com/star-ledger/photo/2012/04/10848260-standard.jpg

By Tomas Dinges
April 21, 2012

The likelihood of rain has postponed Monday morning’s scheduled flyover of the space shuttle Enterprise over New York City, NASA officials said yesterday.

The shuttle was to be flown from Washington, D.C., atop a modified 747 and conduct several flyovers of Manhattan before landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. But rain is forecast for New York City and Washington on Monday. With its awkward payload, the jet is sensitive to precipitation and as a result, NASA managers and officials from the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, where the shuttle will be delivered, decided yesterday to delay the flight.

Officials said they will review weather forecasts and announce a new flight date "as soon as practical." In the weeks after landing in New York City, the shuttle will be placed on a barge and moved up the Hudson River to the Intrepid museum, where it will become part of a permanent exhibition scheduled to open this summer.

[NYguy]

http://www.nyacknewsandviews.com/2012/04/enterpriseflyoverfriam/

Fri Forecast: It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A Space Shuttle!

http://www.nyacknewsandviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/SpaceShuttleEnterprise201204.png

April 26, 2012 by A. Staff

■As it first approaches the area, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) flies up the Hudson River past the west side of Manhattan at 1,500 feet, and then climbs to 3,000 after it passes the George Washington Bridge.

■SCA will then make a left-handed U-turn when it reaches the Tappan Zee Bridge to fly down the Hudson, descending back to 1,500 ft when it reaches the Alpine radio tower near the New York/New Jersey border.

■SCA continues past Manhattan down to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

■Once it passes south of the Verrazano, the next part of SCA’s itinerary depends on which runways are in use at Newark Airport.




http://www.nycaviation.com/where-to-watch-space-shuttle-enterprise-in-new-york/


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/142936785/original.jpg


Enroute to its new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Space Shuttle Enterprise is tentatively scheduled to fly to New York on Friday, April 27, between 10:30am and 11:30am, riding piggyback on a Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

This once-in-a-lifetime flight will be visible to millions of people as the Shuttle/Carrier combo fly over much of the New York City area at low altitude (1000-3000 ft) before landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The five boroughs will see the most action, but areas as far north as Tarrytown and Nyack, NY, and as far east as Westbury, NY, will get some shuttle love as well.

On the map above, the blue line represents an approximation of the planned path, green thumbtacks mark the best spots to spot the action, and the white diamonds mark key landmarks on the path.

Based on an FAA flight itinerary we’ve obtained, here are 17 spots in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester where we think you’re most likely to get a good view.



http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/spaceshipped_8j58sHFiRBbOWYyyKMF99L

Spaceshipped
Shuttle to buzz NYC today

By BILL SANDERSON
April 27, 2012


Everyone in the metro New York area will have a front-row seat today for the space shuttle Enterprise’s low-altitude grand tour of the region — on a journey leading eventually to its new home on the USS Intrepid. “This will be just about the most exciting plane-spotting event for New Yorkers ever,” said Matt Molnar, editor of the aviation-enthusiast Web site NYCAviation.com. The shuttle — piggybacked atop a Boeing 747 — will take off from Dulles Airport near Washington at about 9:30 a.m. and is expected to arrive over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at about 10:30.

The plane will land on Kennedy Airport’s 14,572-foot-long Runway 31L. The shuttle will be taken off the 747 in the next few weeks. In June, it’s expected to be transferred to a barge and floated back up the Hudson River to the Intrepid Museum, where it’s expected to draw 1.3 million visitors per year. The museum expects to open the shuttle to the public in July.





It will look fantastic when its new home is built.

Great news!!!

Looks Like All Systems Go for Space Shuttle Museum (http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2012/03/20/looks_like_all_systems_go_for_space_shuttle_museum.php#4f68b9e485216d4211015d0b)
Tuesday, March 20, 2012, by Dave Hogarty
http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/4f68b9ea85216d416d01164a/untitled-1024-4.jpg

[yankeesfan1000]

Awesomeeee. I'm definitely going to be posting up on the Hudson River Park starting around 1030 looking for a space shuttle.

[NYguy]

It should be arriving in the area very soon...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-enterprise-heads-to-new-york-20120427,0,448177.story
Shuttle Enterprise takes off for New York -- and a new home

http://www.trbimg.com/img-4f984e75/turbine/la-na-nn-space-shuttle-new-york-20120425-002/600


By Rene Lynch
April 27, 2012



The NASA shuttle is getting the ultimate piggy-back ride to its new home in New York City this morning, setting the stage for a dramatic flyover of the world's most famous skyline. The Enterprise was affixed atop a specially modified 747 that took off moments ago from Dulles International Airport near Washington, headed for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

There will be plenty of photo ops before it lands: The aircraft will fly near a variety of landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, although the exact flight plan has not been revealed. NASA plans to live Tweet the event.

New York's newest tourist attraction was named after the fictional Starship Enterprise from "Star Trek." (Among those Tweeting about the Enterprise's arrival Friday morning? Leonard Nimoy, who, of course, played Spock on "Star Trek.") The Enterprise is one of four NASA shuttles that are going into retirement at various places throughout the United States, after a fierce political battle over which cities would get one.

[NYguy]

Took these shots a little while ago...


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/142941306/original.jpg



http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/142941307/original.jpg



http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/142941308/original.jpg

[NYguy]

Flying above future home...


http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/ht_space_shuttle_enterprise_ss_jt_120427_ssh.jpg
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/slideshow/space-shuttle-enterprise-arrives-in-new-york-16154732

[yankeesfan1000]

Went for a run and saw there's 2-3 floors of vertical structural steel in the ground for the new Whitney Museum. Don't usually take a camera running with me, so no photos but something to keep an eye on.

[NYguy]

^ It is.


Anther shot of the Shuttle Enterprise making an entrance into the City.


SkipSteuart (http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnidirectional/6974205556/sizes/z/in/photostream/)

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[J. Will]

Is the Space Shuttle up for display yet? I'm going to NY in a few weeks, and would like to go see it if it is.

[JSsocal]

^^No, but you could literally see it from the arterial road that takes you through JFK, just sitting there on the tarmac near a hanger.

[mrnyc]

Went for a run and saw there's 2-3 floors of vertical structural steel in the ground for the new Whitney Museum. Don't usually take a camera running with me, so no photos but something to keep an eye on.


i believe thats the highline hq part of the plan --- the museum to be is still a construction pit.

[Duck From NY]

http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/space%20shuttle%20museum%20exterior-thumb.jpg

Man, with all the new skyscrapers, museums, arenas, residentials, and low-rises, so many of New York City's uglier or empty areas will be filled out. I love this city almost as much as Pittsburgh ;)

[mrnyc]

from today -- here is the highline park hq and whitney progress:

http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/5ce9a2ae.jpg

the concrete is poured for the whitney basement
http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/bc0a1168.jpg

renders
http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/e27c35d6.jpg

http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/b8b5f60c.jpg

http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/ee423285.jpg

highline park hq bldg render
http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/aa27aea8.jpg

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http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/5a8d974c.jpg

[mrnyc]

what the heck couple more

who could resist, right?!!

http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/b609b918.jpg


http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad293/meesalikeu5/ISTANBUL/b0efbea4.jpg

[NYguy]

http://www.space.com/15983-space-shuttles-nyc-houston-sunday.html

Space Shuttles Move Through NYC and Houston Sunday: How to Watch

by Tariq Malik
02 June 2012

A NASA space shuttle prototype and high-fidelity shuttle replica will make some big moves in New York and Houston on Sunday (June 2), and residents in both cities have a chance to spot the winged spacecraft — one by sea and the other by land. In New York City, NASA's space shuttle Enterprise will be visible from some of the city's beaches and coast when it takes a barge from Jamaica Bay to the New York Harbor. The prototype shuttle, which never flew in space but was used in pivotal landing tests, is destined to go on public display Manhattan's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Today, the shuttle will be craned onto its barge for the upcoming sea ride.

For New Yorkers, Enterprise will begin its barge trip at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT), when the tugboat pulling the ship leaves John F. Kennedy International Airport for the New York Harbor.......After shipping out from JFK, Enterprise will make its way toward New York Harbor by traveling along the shore of Queens and Brooklyn. The planned route will bring Enterprise by the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge at 3:30 p.m. EDT, slip by Coney Island at 4:19 p.m. EDT and then pass under the Verrazano Bridge at 5:34 p.m. EDT before pulling into a temporary dock in New Jersey's Port Elizabeth.

This is only the first leg of Enterprise's sea trip to the Intrepid. On Tuesday (June 5), the shuttle will finish the journey by leaving Port Elizabeth at 9:15 a.m. EDT, passing the Statue of Liberty at 9:50 a.m. EDT, floating up the Hudson River by the World Trade Center's Freedom Tower at 10:40 a.m. EDT and arriving at the Intrepid museum at about 11:30 a.m. ED

[NYguy]

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/space-center/2012/jun/4/slideshow-shuttle-enterprise-sails-hudson/


http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_1_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137

The space shuttle Enterprise is towed past a pier filled with spectators at Coney Island in New York, Sunday, June 3, 2012. The prototype space shuttle that arrived
in New York City by air earlier this spring is on the move again, this time by sea, to it's final resting place at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the west side of Manhattan.


http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_2_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137

People gather to watch and take pictures as the space shuttle Enterprise is towed on a barge underneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York, Sunday, June 3, 2012.
The prototype space shuttle that arrived in New York City earlier this spring is headed to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the west side of Manhattan.


http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_4_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137



http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_6_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137

Spectators watch the space shuttle Enterprise as it is towed past a beach at Coney Island in New York, Sunday, June 3, 2012. The prototype space shuttle that arrived
in New York City by air earlier this spring is on the move again, this time by sea, to it's final resting place at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the west side of Manhattan.


http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_7_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137

Spectators watch the space shuttle Enterprise as it is towed past a beach at Coney Island in New York, Sunday, June 3, 2012


http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/image/2012/06/04/intrepid_space_shuttle_8_r640x453.jpg?c9f6f7c2167372918b42622c875fdab25859e137

The space shuttle Enterprise is towed on a barge underneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York.




MTAPhotos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtaphotos/with/7337564812/)

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Nrbelex (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/7335486568/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

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Shill718 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/07181953/7334913066/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

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Observe The Random (http://www.flickr.com/photos/70095565@N03/7332386050/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

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[J. Will]

Any chance they might delay the move until tomorrow? I will be staying near the Hudson River tomorrow night, and would like to see it being moved myself.

[mrnyc]

Any chance they might delay the move until tomorrow? I will be staying near the Hudson River tomorrow night, and would like to see it being moved myself.

sighhh - willy willy willy. we have something called the internets to find out things like that:

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/space-shuttle-enterprise-reaches-its-permanent-home-1.3765410

but you can always go over there and have a look ;)

[NYguy]

nasa hq photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/7346902070/sizes/h/in/photostream/)

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7231/7346902070_72d37b3950_h.jpg



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Chelsea Stahl (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chelseastahl/7346853034/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7220/7346853034_37496b32e9_b.jpg



stefbearwitness (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bearwitnesspictures/7161633627/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

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