PATH's New World Trade Center Station

WTC PATH station, with 1
World Trade Center in the background 

Fifteen years in (re-)construction (and it's still not finished), at a cost of $4 billion dollars (and it's still not finished), the main hall of the PATH's new World Trade Center station main's building, designed by starchitect Santiago Calatrava, is on the cusp of opening. But the entire hub is, unaccountably, still not finished. Incomplete or not, it is worth an ogle, and I did so on Tuesday on my way back from an appointment in the city.

The external form of the main hall, or Oculus, retains some aspects of Calatrava's original design, though his plan for a retractable roof, much like bird's wings, gave way to a rigid white steel exoskeleton, with additional security features. Its interior consists of a vast, marble-floored hall surrounded by ribbed arches, as if it were the evacuated belly of some immense white alien. I immediately thought of the movie Prometheus, which seems like a belated influence. 

The Oculus mirrors the futuristic ossuary-like maze of corridors, which I have featured in the past in some random photos, that connect the station to other buildings like Brookfield Place and West Street. As I walked around the atrium space and snapped photos, I did not see many people (as the photos make clear), but I suppose they will start arriving once the shops open and the exits at Vesey Street and Church Street open up.

The headline of critic Michael Kimmelman's New York Times critique of the building, linked above, refers to it as a boondoggle. Yet he does initially praise the Oculus's eye-catching space.  But he concludes that, given its cost, lack of functionality, and insignificance in the New York-New Jersey public transportation system, this glorified vanity sculpture project represents a failure of multiple kinds, as well as a waste of public funds. (Where did all that money go?) 

I know I may sound churlish, but I actually liked the PATH's rough hewn temporary station, which opened not long after the 9/11 attacks. It eventually closed and instead, the site turned into a cardboard-lined warren whose navigability seemed geared to train rats. Given the number of New Yorkers who may find themselves displaced in coming years and undertaking a move to New Jersey, the transit officials probably should do everything they can to ensure that the hub will be able to accommodate as many travelers as possible.

When it will be completed remains a question; the original 5-year-estimate has been exceeded by an order of 3, so perhaps by 2020 or 2025, barring Manhattan being inundated by rising sea water, it will be done. Also, when the connections with the MTA's lines will be open also isn't clear. As confusing as the old WTC station (pre-9/11) was, you could exit the PATH and head directly to the 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., with an array of shops dotting the way. Not today, though. All of that is apparently coming soon. 

The station is worth seeing, though, especially before all that white turns gray and then black (which might have been more appropriate given the graveyard and memorial next door), especially if you don't have to travel through the station during rush hour, and it isn't raining or snowing outside. I can say from experience that all that marble flooring is extremely slippery, like a mid-winter lake rink, making it a major hazard, which I imagine someone must have considered before laying down so much of it, but perhaps they didn't. It looks pretty, though, and that appears to be all that matters, whatever the costs.

Part of the soaring white spine 

The path past the PATH station to the
9/11 Memorial 

Approaching the Oculus, from inside the station

The Oculus, with the skylight visible

The skylight

Another view 

Towards the WTC PATH trains

Banksy in NY (October 2013)

UPDATE: October 23, 2013: It appears the police, no fans of Banksy, may have shut him down, even if temporarily. Today on his Better Out than In blog, he notes that his art piece has been "cancelled due to police activity." Oh boy....

Once upon a time the artist known as Banksy was an unknown graffitist and tagger whose visual-verbal social and political commentaries, popping up in unexpected places, thrilled fans, sparked furious speculation about his identity among fellow taggers and artworld cognoscenti, and enraged police (and some of his peers). That was then. These days, Banksy is a renowned and acclaimed money-making commodity, the star of several documentaries, an artworld fixture, and so mainstream that earlier this year he publicly announced a monthlong "artists [sic] residency" in New York City, titled "Better Out Than In." His stay has included his expected graffiti pieces as well as work in other media, including a multimedia, sonic traveling caravan called the "The Sirens of Lambs" (a van driving through the streets of New York, featuring stuffed animals bleating); conceptual art and performance (a Banksy art table along the art vendors' strip outside Central Park, where he had a vendor sold all his works anonymously for $60 each); and traditional paintings-on-canvas, like the ones below, a collaboration with the Brazilian graffiti artists Os Gemeos, which are hanging outdoors beneath a High Line Park train trestle on W. 24th Street, until the end of today, adjacent to the main Chelsea art gallery district.

The guard and both paintings

Initially I was a bit agnostic about Banksy's visit, because while on the one hand I have followed his work for years, I also felt like these pieces would--and they have--involve a bit of chain-pulling, forcing people interested in the work to traipse around the city's five boroughs to find his offerings (or miss them, as with the Central Park art show) before building owners, art patrons, other artists, or the cops destroyed them. That's exactly what has happened. Some pieces have been painted or sanded over. Some have been defaced. And many have been mobbed, as was the case at the public installation at W 24th Street. In anticipation of this, Banksy stationed guards--I heard that initially there was just one, but I couldn't get any of the guards there, who were polite but not especially friendly, to confirm this--to facilitate crowd control and ensure that the paintings not only were not damaged, but also not carted off. I saw on Gothamist that by midday, when Banksy had posted images of the installation online, the area already was drawing sizable throngs, but I wanted to see this piece in particular since it was a collaboration with artists I also admire, and it wouldn't involve too much of a journey, so I decided to wait until the early evening, when the dinner hour might thin viewers out. It was a good choice; there was a crowd, and I had to wait for about 15 minutes until a group of about 40 people in front of me were allowed past the yellow tape, but after that, I was able to enter, view and photograph the two pieces, and leave. 

The painting on the left was mostly Banksy, enriched and tagged by Os Gemeos, while the right was the inverse. I liked the ironies of each graffitist's additions to the canvases, which visually conveyed the idea of standing out in a crowd, but also signified a gesture toward (in terms of contiguity and medium, as well as the semi-private gesture of the guards and yellow tape) and against (a public, outdoor, free display, open to the elements) the multi-billion dollar élite artworld just steps away (or rather, all around). That they also appeared to serve more as backdrops for Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and similar social media sites goes without saying; I noted several people not really even looking at the paintings, but rather quickly posing themselves in front of them and once they had their shareable shot, they were gone. This exhibit, perhaps more so than some of the others so far, also represented in material form the trajectory of Banksy's career: a politically oriented public artist working in a medium now embraced and celebrated by many of the very people, institutions and systems that once ignored or scorned it and him. Not everyone is a Banksy fan, though; the New York Police Department is allegedly still trying to find and arrest him. Good luck with that!

The crowd outside the Banksy-Os Gemeos exhibit

Looking into the space

Posing near related graffiti

Before the next wave of spectators enters the space

One of the guards

Another guard, in front of one of the paintings

Graffiti on one of the walls

A nearby mural (across 24th St.)

Domesticating Columbus

Marcus Yan for the New York Times

"Only in New York City." That's how one of the guards at the base of Tatzu Nishi's Discovering Columbus public art installation summed up the remarkable creation now open for visitors until November 18, 2012 in New York's Columbus Circle. He was correct. Though Nishi has created similar conceptual pieces elsewhere, and New York is hardly starved for spectacles, there is only one statue of Genoa's favored son, and only one Columbus Circle in the city. Nishi's audacious project required him to convince the city's administration to let him to construct a carapace around the pedestal and rostral column of Gaetano Russo's 1892, 13-foot monument to Columbus's 1492 journey to and encounters in the New World, and then, at the base of and around the Columbus statue itself, a living room. Not only did Nishi persuade the city to greenlight the project, but today, on what is actually Columbus Day (or Peoples of the Americas Day, as someone renamed it years ago) I walked through the result.

Outside the tower

Rather than air, a temporary, living room, furnished with flooring, wallpaper, couches and chairs, tables and lamps, and a flat-screen TV running last week's Vice-Presidential candidate debate, filled the space around the statue, not only bringing others and I closer to it, but domesticating it, figuratively and literally. Nishi managed to resituate the monument within a human scale, and, to my mind, transformed it, at least within the context of that space, from an emblem and symbol of the terrible centuries of domination, suffering and oppression that colonialism and imperialism unleashed and that Western History has, until recently, often effaced or downplayed into, if even briefly, a different sort of figure. A postcolonial act, it seemed, the monument and the ideas inherent in it deterritorialized, rescaled and repositioned in potency, even if for the span of one's walk around it, one's gaze upon it, one's focus on the numerous other picayune details the room offered. One could, ironically enough, ignore it for an instant or two. Instead of looming over the (metro)polis, Nishi's re-presentation of Columbus now stands nearly at our eye level--or his knees, at least; for Manute Bol, eye-to-eye might be more of a likelihood. We were nevertheless forbidden to touch him, or should I say, it.

The tower from street level

Not that history itself changes because of the exhibit, but at least symbolically, for the duration the installation and the moment of one's interaction, the exchange resets. I don't know if any of this was part of Nishi's thinking, but given that the European age of exploration also included encounters and subsequent wars with Asia, transforming that continent in the process, perhaps it subsists somewhere in his thought. I thought it quite apt that the young man checking the tickets, which were free and available only through an online website (if you were lucky enough not to be kicked out of the system repeatedly, as I experienced and as others told me they were, before I finally lucked on a date and time that had not yet oversubscribed), was, as he mentioned in passing, from the Dominican Republic, one of the two countries on the island, Hispaniola, where Columbus initially touched down (though the settlement he established there, Natividad, was on the site of what is now Cap Haïtien, in what is now Haiti).

Regarding Columbus

Mostly I felt the sheer elating strangeness of walking around, standing and sitting down in a living room high above a teeming streetscape when that's usually impossible to do--and with a giant statue nearby. I did overhear one woman standing near me in the room mentioning to a man beside her that she lived just a stone's throw away in a nearby tower and the view wasn't so unusual, but added to him that even she was a bit disoriented by this new proximity to the monument. For the majority of visitors, though, even those living in New York's or other metropolises' skyscrapers, I imagine the experience of Nishi's public installation will probably still feel a bit defamiliarizing and exhilarating. Perhaps the large numbers of billionaire New Yorkers who live in aeries brimming with multimillion-dollar pieces of giant artwork might respond with indifference, but like most of the people who entered the room with, I found myself smiling and staring with marvel. And then, because of the time restrictions and my desire to free up space for the next group, I was descending the stairs and back on the street, exiting an ingenious and surprisingly powerful work of public art. Columbus Circle did not, and will not, look the same.

In the living room

More photos:

Broadway, from the summit

The crowd, from the stairwell leading to the summit

The crowd

The doorway leading to the living room

Inside Nishi's installation

Central Park

Looking east, up Central Park South (60th Street)