Contemplates The Gates and public places

...There was a great deal of official interest in knowing how many people would actually come to the Park...

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 93 NOTEBOOK Public parks, like many other public institutions, are almost never created by the forces of supply and demand alone...

...Bloomberg's efforts to limit gatherings in Central Park and Washington Square Park would contradict any claim that he truly cares to protect the rights of free speech and assembly, especially when those rights are claimed by an irate and politically engaged public...

...I expected fewer visits on Sunday, but was wrong...

...On learning this, the Mayor's Office realized that we had taken a step toward generating real numbers through a practical method for estimating large crowds in public...

...Central Park manager Doug Blonsky called me for a meeting at his office a few weeks before the Gates were to be placed along the park's pathways...

...We will be thinking about this question for some time...

...The Conservancy manages the park and pays for additional gardeners and park maintenance workers...

...The artistic brilliance of the Gates, from this parks-movement perspective, was that they allowed Central Park visitors to use the park as they normally would have, but by marking lawn areas and paths in orange lines that tracked hills and disappeared into woods, the Gates called our attention to how precious this public landscape in the heart of the city really is...

...One can hold up the success of the Central Park Conservancy as a model of community involvement in park restoration, but it is not a partnership approach that can be translated easily to public parks that are not surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in the world...

...From these sample numbers we could calculate an estimate of overall daily attendance...

...Of course, most visitors to the Gates were unaware of how the park is funded and enjoyed or criticized the event from far more personal viewpoints...

...Visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art increased by 300 percent during the same period...

...Perhaps, when she looks at the photos, this child will try to imagine, as I try, what the Gates would have looked like in a summer green park or with leaves turning red and gold...

...What did the millions of visitors experience at the Gates art installation...

...But even the great urban parks of America often fall victim to falling public budgets...

...We estimated that the first day brought 380,000 visits (we can't say that these are individual visitors...

...If it remains in effect, this policy will bar not only large concerts, but also political rallies such as the one the mayor and the Police Department refused to permit during the 2004 Republican National Convention...

...From the curves of visitor arrivals at the entrances on the first two days, we could then do counts over the next two weeks at expected peak times and selected entrances...

...In fact, the problem of figuring out how people use a park raises broader issues about public places as public goods...

...I doubt the hope will be realized...

...Of course, Friedman never considers the exclusion problem...

...Although attendance on the north, or Harlem, end of the park was lighter at first than along the more affluent east, west, and south sides, as the end of the installation approached the number of north side visitors increased dramatically...

...On weekdays, teachers and schoolchildren arrived in gleeful bands, and on the weekends children with their parents were present in large numbers...

...But think back to the Gates for a moment: was there ever in our New York experience a public art event so successful on so many levels...

...In Capitalism and Freedom, economist Milton Friedman questions the need for government funding of parks (along with many other things that we often hope governments will provide...

...WILLIAM KORNBLUM is a sociologist on the faculty of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a member of the Dissent editorial board...

...Greater freedom of access has made it more difficult to keep track of visitors, but measures of public use are in demand as we try to understand just how vital to the city's life places like Central Park are...

...Their continued existence is taken for granted by the public, when in fact each square foot is contested, with schemes forever being hatched to take away land for greedy purposes...

...Some park visitors said the money could have been used for better causes (several were named), but I heard no one suggest that the money should have been spent on Central Park itself...

...Over the years, pressure from surrounding communities for easier access also meant that new entrances were created, so that today there are about fifty-three openings into the park, as opposed to twenty-three when Olmsted resigned as park manager...

...That's also a way of visiting the park and remembering how much we have to cherish in our hard-won and always contested public places...

...The Mayor's Office and the Central Park Conservancy, which Blonsky also heads, were getting signals that hotel reservations were skyrocketing for the weeks in February when the Gates would be up...

...In years to come, the photos will remind people that for just a moment, in the winter of 2005, Central Park's familiar landscape became at once more real and more abstract...

...Starving the public sector, a goal of some conservative political operatives, leaves public institutions desperate to find non-tax solutions for maintaining their budgets...

...Hadn't the Christo wrap of the Berlin Reichstag brought over five million visitors...

...Their existence depends on the foresight of civic leaders who have a sense of the needs of an entire community...

...Over the past twenty years the park has been restored to its present magnificence with a combination of public and private funding—and the private funding, raised largely from wealthy individuals and major corporations by the Conservancy, has made all the difference...

...To estimate the number of visits to the park during the Gates, I devised a simple sampling framework...

...Fortunately for those of us who also love parks nearer to home, Friedman does find an argument for the use of tax funds for city parks: it is far more difficult to charge for access in these cases...

...Without such visionaries as Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the American parks movement would not have existed...

...There is no reason, Friedman argues, for the federal government to use public funds for national parks, because they usually are accessible through a limited number of roads, where entrance fees can easily be collected...

...In principle, the event did not cost the city anything because all costs were paid for by money the artists had raised, much of it from commercial dealers who would in fact profit from the event...

...It was bitter cold, but the sky was crystal clear, and the park filled with people eager to be on hand NOTEBOOK when the drapes were pulled down on the 7,500 Gates...

...Because I had an insiders' view of the Gates installation, I want to use it to reflect on some critical issues of art, community, and public space...

...As with many city events throughout the world, the police and other authorities had done some estimating, but those were essentially "guestimates...

...Documentaries and books about what Christo and Jeanne Claude achieved and what the public DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 95 NOTEBOOK made of it all are scheduled to appear...

...Central Park recently celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth year, but its nineteenthcentury creators faced plenty of criticism from the city's real estate leaders and from skeptics who doubted that it could become a successful public place...

...The count for the second day was 425,000...

...With the exception of one or two rainy days, which did dampen attendance, the weather was cold but bright, and two snowfalls brought people back to the park for breathtaking views of the Gates against the bright snow and dark landscape...

...I got a generous letter of thanks from Mayor Bloomberg, who by championing the Gates after previous mayors had spurned them may hope to have overcome a bit of the rancor over the corralling and manhandling of demonstrators at the 2004 Republican National Convention...

...I don't know why you say it's funny," her dad responded a bit testily...

...With students and colleagues at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, I had often been called on to conduct surveys of park users, and I frequently consult on planning issues or problems of conflict in the park, so perhaps I was a logical choice for the assignment...

...This was one of the most heavily photographed events I have ever witnessed...

...As a sociologist who studies the life of urban public spaces, I am worried about the privatization of public spaces...

...of the first day of the installation, a Saturday, crowds began gathering...

...The grand achievement of Christo and Jeanne Claude is overshadowed by the changing seasons and the press of daily life in this impossibly busy city...

...Could I devise a method of counting visits to the park during the two weeks of the Christo event...

...That's how we know that in the first two years of its operations the park was drawing more than two 94 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 million annual visits, even though the population center of Manhattan was still below Fourteenth Street...

...When Olmsted lost his position as Central Park manager in wrangles with Tammany bosses, the park also lost its system of accurate visitor counts...

...Hotels reported record use for a February, and many New Yorkers must have been surprised when European friends suddenly announced that they were coming to town...

...and like many New Yorkers, I fear the loss of Central Park as a gathering place for rallies and demonstrations...

...Yet as an unprecedented public event, the Gates can still claim a legitimate purchase on our memories...

...It turned out that the Berlin numbers were not defensible: there had been no systematic counting procedure...

...These doubts help explain why the best observations and counts of public use of Central Park were compiled during the first five years of the park's existence...

...The sun came out that afternoon, and there was a huge surge of visitors...

...Everywhere one went in the city there were conversations about the Gates...

...These are crude estimates, probably only accurate to the nearest one hundred thousand at best...

...He stationed a "park keeper" at every entrance, part of whose job was to compile exact counts of those entering the park during its official hours...

...The real work would be in deploying and supporting the counters and "crunching" the numbers at the end of each day...

...When the Mayor's Office got our numbers, staff first expressed some disappointment...

...It went on like that for the next two weeks...

...Was there ever one that so captured the imagination of people who don't ordinarily flock to see conceptual art...

...TODAY WE ESTIMATE that Central Park attracts approximately twenty-five million visits a year, about 1.2 million of which occur in a normal February...

...By the end of the run, we estimated that there had been just short of four million visits to Central Park during the two weeks, an increase of almost 400 percent over a normal two weeks in February...

...And yet only a few months after the Gates were taken down, in a move that surprised the public for its stealth, the Bloomberg administration opened another chapter of the park numbers game by signaling that it would limit gatherings on the Great Lawn to fifty thousand people or less...

...Standing at the entrances to Central Park, I heard quite a bit of clucking about the twenty million dollars Christo and Jeanne Claude said had gone into the event...

...Nor does he give us any reason why places like Central Park should have been wrested from the real estate market in the first place...

...And, as they mature, I would wager that many of the children who flocked to the event will be trying to put words to their feelings about what they saw...

...Only those who wish to visit the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone, or any of the federally managed natural and historic parks need be required to pay...

...Some feared it would serve only as a parade ground for the horse and buggy set, while others warned that the vulgar behavior of the lower classes would threaten the enjoyment of the park by the privileged classes...

...But it's no small chore to count park visitors and come up with credible numbers...

...We would extrapolate from these counts to hourly numbers and aggregate these into daily figures for the first weekend...

...There is an "externality problem" in that we cannot account for who uses city parks and cannot require that only actual park users pay their costs...

...By 8 a.m...

...Yet almost invariably this insider view changed when they saw the installation and experienced the huge surge of park visits from New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors, domestic and foreign...

...that is, how expensive it would be to visit national parks if their budgets were dependent on gate receipts alone...

...Why had New York not beaten that Berlin count...

...We can conjure up the after-images of the Gates and try to impose them on the existing park, whatever season it is...

...Olmsted was the Central Park manager for those years...

...Park volunteers recruited by the Conservancy and students from the Graduate Center would do ten-minute counts each hour of the opening weekend at all the park's entrances...

...For these chores I relied on the extremely capable staff of the Central Park Conservancy, but I organized many of the counts along the park's west side myself and spent a lot of time at the entrances, counting with my hand clicker and talking with visitors...

...From people who work in Central Park I often heard it said, before the Gates opening, that the park itself is a work of art...

...No," she insisted, I don't mean funny funny, I mean funny different...

...Daddy, it's so funny," said a girl who looked to be about ten...

...Why try to embellish it with these obtrusive gates...