[NYguy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/n...er-casino.html

Planting a Field of Lights Where a Developer Hopes to Raise a Casino
Is an immersive piece featuring 17,000 illuminated, flowerlike stems a precursor to a huge gambling hall along the East River?





By James Barron
Nov. 1, 2023

It’s beginning to look a lot like the Christmas tourist season in part because of an installation that will put 17,000 illuminated, flowerlike stems on a vacant lot in Midtown facing the East River. The opening is scheduled for Dec. 15.

That date is three months later than originally planned for the display, which is by the British artist Bruce Munro. The installation will be temporary: The Soloviev Group, the development company that owns the site and is covering costs of the art display with its charitable arm, wants to put a casino there.

At least 10 firms have similar casino dreams for sites in Times Square, Hudson Yards, next to Citi Field and even atop the Saks Fifth Avenue department store near Rockefeller Center. Stefanos Chen, a colleague who has covered the competition for casino licenses, noted that the commission of Munro’s work was a sign of what developers were willing to do to engender good will — an important factor in winning over local officials and residents who will have a say in the licensing process.

Michael Hershman, the chief executive of the Soloviev Group and a member of the Soloviev Foundation’s advisory board, said the installation would stay up for a year “regardless of whether we’re awarded a license or not.” He also said that if Soloviev were to win a casino license, part of Munro’s exhibit would figure in the landscaping design. “It’ll become a permanent fixture,” Hershman said.

The installation will be an immersive, walk-through experience, like “Bruce Munro: Light at Sensorio,” which open in 2019 in Pasa Robles, Calif. Our writer Patricia Leigh Brown called the California exhibit a “mind-bending spectacle” that has become an Instagram phenomenon. “The subtly changing patterns of this light safari, activated by a nebula of fiber-optic cables attached to hidden projectors, seem to inspire a cathedral-like awe,” she wrote.

Hershman said the conversations that led to commissioning Munro for the East Side site began before the pandemic, when Hershman and the sons of the developer Sheldon Solow were considering the future of Solow’s art collection. In the decade before his death in 2020, Solow had become a major seller of masterpieces at auction, but he “was not willing to give the public access” to the art that he had acquired, Hershman said.

After Solow died, his son Stefan Soloviev (who uses a pre-Ellis Island family name) became chairman of the renamed Soloviev Group, and took “a completely different approach, to open the collection to the public,” Hershman said. The foundation, also renamed, “wanted to do something as a gift to the city, to let the city know that we’re operating in a much different mode than Sheldon operated in,” he added.

“We thought, coming out of this Covid era, we need to do something to bring a little happiness and a little brightness back into people’s lives,” Hershman said. “Little did we know that after Covid, we’d still be under a huge shadow with so many crises going on.”

He added: “There’s so much stress in our lives, so much uncertainty, so much unhappiness, that anything we can do or anyone can do to try to take people’s minds away from whatever problems the city is dealing with or they individually are dealing with can only help.”

The installation will be open three nights a week — Thursday through Saturday — from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. It will also be open on the upcoming Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day holidays. Visitors will need tickets for a time slot, but unlike other Munro installations admission will be free.

Munro, 64, said the Soloviev installation would be his first in New York City, where he has not spent much time. “I first visited New York late in life — I was about 40,” he said. He said his trip reminded him of a call he received from his mother while she was visiting New York when he was young and at home in England. “She said it was like the movies,” he said. “She went to Tiffany’s. She did all the touristy things.”

So on his first trip he called her, only to realize he was saying the same things. “I said, ‘Mum, I’m in New York; it feels like you’re in a film with the yellow cabs and the high buildings.’”