Situating Zuccotti Park: The Landscape of the Wall Street Protest

The nerve center of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest, one that began September 17, is a gently shaded urban space called Zuccotti Park, once named Liberty Plaza Park and now renamed Liberty Square by the protesters. The park is situated on prime real estate in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan. The boundaries of the park are Broadway on the east, Trinity Place on the west, Liberty Street on the north, and Cedar Street on the south. The site of the World Trade Center is a block away to the west. A prominent feature is the bright and tall red steel abstract sculpture titled Joie de Vivre (1998) by Mark di Suvero.

Brookfield Properties, the developers of One Liberty Plaza, the skyscraper just to the north - formerly known as the the U.S. Steel Building and built in 1973 - are the owners of the park, but the large real estate company made an agreement with the city of New York to operate the park as a space with 24-hour access by the public. Such an agreement is typical in the city. When developers add extra square feet to a building or construct outside the normal guidelines, they are often required to construct an adjacent area for the public. During the events of September 11, 2001, Liberty Plaza Park was covered in debris. The park has been extensively renovated, financed by Brookfield, and it was renamed Zuccotti Park in 2006 in honor of the corporation's New York-born chairman, John E. Zuccotti.

A New York Fall Calendar: Selected Festivals, Special Events, and Suggested Walks

On a Thursday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, the rains came in and the wind whipped around from the north, and in the wake of the frontal passage it felt gloriously like fall. People walked the streets in sweaters and long scarves, and for a few days, everyone looked ready to say goodbye to summer. Alas, the feeling of fall didn't last. Warmer and humid weather returned, so in retrospect, that first nip of cooler and drier air now seems like a dress rehearsal. If all goes according to the official forecasts, however, we should get another taste of autumn this coming weekend.

Even if it feels like fall in the city, it just may not look like it yet. In New York City, we generally won't see the fall foliage peak until the last week in October and the first week of November. In the meantime, we're in full festival mode. Fall weather also means we're entering the high season for invigorating long walks. Below are the dates for several seasonal special events leading up to Thanksgiving as well as suggestions for seasonal strolls.

strolling The Mall in Central Park on Halloween

WALK: Truman Capote's novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's, begins in the month of October. It's a great time to follow Holly Golightly around the city. Read Mapping Holly Golightly: Walking Off Breakfast at Tiffany's (originally published October 14, 2008)
The novel's final dramatic sequence, with the narrator holding onto a runaway horse and Holly playing Calamity Jane, takes place September 30, his (as well as Truman Capote's). The novel unfolds over a sequence of seasons, and the story ends with the completion of a full annual cycle.

• GARDEN EXHIBITION: Fall Flowers of Japan
Through October 30, 2001
New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Website 

• FESTIVAL: Oktoberfest
Through October 23, 2011
events held at venues throughout the city

• FESTIVAL: The New York Musical Theatre Festival
Through October 16, 2011
47th Street Theatre, McGinn/Cazale Theatre, Signature Theatre - The Peter Norton Space, and more venues Website 

WALK: An Autumn Walk in Upper Manhattan: From The Cloisters to Audubon Park (originally published October 20, 2010)
With the arrival of cool autumn temperatures, a trek to upper Manhattan is in order, specifically a vigorous hike around Fort Tryon Park followed by a meditative walk in The Cloisters. It's lofty up here, away from the secular masses and their petty bourgeois pursuits and their traffic fumes and discordant notes.

View of The Cloisters from Linden Terrace in Fort Tryon Park

• FESTIVAL: BAM Next Wave Festival
Through December 18, 2011
Brooklyn Academy of Music Website

• FESTIVAL: Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival
September 29 - October 2, 2011 Website 
events held at venues throughout the city, with many in the Meatpacking District and in Chelsea

• FESTIVAL: The Ninth Annual New York Burlesque Festival
September 29 through October 2, 2011 Website
events held at various venues

• FESTIVAL: The New Yorker Festival
September 30 and October 1-2, 2011
venues around town Website

WALK: A Visit to Liberty Island in the fall (originally published October 30, 2010)
The statue’s dedication fell on an autumn day - October 28, 1886.

The Cheerless Life of the Umbrella Maker, circa 1853

The 25-year-old umbrella maker depicted in this illustration, one of scores of girls making such a profession on Nassau and William Streets in the 1850s, did not have an easy life. She had run away from her poor family of Jersey, all of them "charcoal burners." Arriving in New York, she had a hard time finding work and was abused by some of her employers. She said, "There are more rascals in New York than I thought crawled on the whole airth, when I was a young girl out in the charcoal region."



She finally found a woman who gave her room and board and taught her how to cover umbrellas. But the woman had an ulterior motive for hiring the young girl. The woman wanted to lure her to the prostitution trades. When she made this demand explicit, our umbrella girl punched her employer and knocked her down. Another man soon hired her, also giving her room and board, but he, too, harbored similar motives. She explained that after she got her wages and a loan, she called him a "rascal" and punched him out, too. She said she should have stayed in Jersey and married a charcoal burner, for they were an honest bunch. Her wages as an umbrella maker were low, and the work was hard.

A Sense of Place: Reading Willem de Kooning's GOTHAM NEWS

The exhaustive Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art boasts nearly two hundred works by the influential postwar artist, so to select only one work out of so many potentially worthy candidates seems somewhat perverse. Yet, an in-depth look at a particularly hectic mixed media canvas, Gotham News, a work dating from 1955, can begin a stimulating inquiry into multiple facets of the artist's life as well as the social context of making art in New York City in the mid-1950s. Mining the painting for meaning and context becomes something like an archaeological dig, beginning quite literally on the surface of things.

Good for MoMA that Gotham News is best viewed in person, because reproductions cannot convey the textual richness of de Kooning's large and thick brushstrokes. Measuring 69 x 79 inches, the painting presents a busy traffic jam of complementary colors, near accidents between red and green, blue and orange, or black and white. If it could talk, the work would yell. The mottled pink passage near the bottom left suggests the presence of mortal flesh in a world of zigzags and sharp corners.

Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997). Gotham News. 1955. Oil, enamel, charcoal, and newspaper transfer on canvas. 69 x 79” (175.3 x 200.7 cm) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As a metaphor, and clued by the work's title, Gotham News expresses the busy energy of New Yorkers in their city. But wait! We can read actual text in this painting, courtesy of the bits of newspaper transfers de Kooning applied to wet paint. Begin by directing your attention to the top middle, and look for the upside down and reversed newspaper ad. That's a movie theater notice for Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 movie To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Read on. It’s like opening an old box in the attic where the fascination comes not with retrieving what’s stored in the box but with the crumpled old newspapers used for packaging.

In addition to the reds, whites, blues, and greens of the thickly layered brushstrokes, the newspaper transfers depict scraps of advertisements for diamond wedding rings, clearance sales, a cartoon woman, and something about television. The vigorous painting whips up a controlled chaos, the many voices of the imagined mythic Gotham all at once engaged in the persuasive practices of journalists and ad men.

Several titles of paintings that precede Gotham News reference life in post-war New York - Fire Island (1946), Secretary (1948), Night (1948), Black Friday (1948), and Night Square (1948). Gansevoort Street (circa 1949) is a swirling study in blood red, appropriate for the meatpacking district. Curator and arts editor Katherine Kuh said she gave Gotham News its name. As an organizer of the American section for the 1956 Venice Biennale, Kuh said she wanted to include works by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and de Kooning, but the biennial theme of "American Artists Paint the City" made it tough for abstractions.

As recounted by Avis Berman in ‪My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator‬, Kuh explained, "At that time I was inclined to believe that all three of them were at least partially indebted to New York." Visiting Kline's Third Avenue studio, she picked out a couple of paintings, naming one of them "New York." Kline called the other one "Third Avenue." De Kooning's studio was nearby, and so the two walked over by way of the rooftops. Kline told her that one of the de Kooning’s paintings in progress was a knockout.

According to Kuh,

"After a sociable drink or two, I noticed the occasional and nearly invisible traces of newsprint pressed into the pigment. According to de Kooning, this technique gave texture to the painting and at the same time amused him, so the picture was promptly baptized Gotham News. Whereas de Kooning was easygoing about my arbitrary naming, Jackson Pollock vehemently disapproved of any theme. 'Goddam it,' he said, 'what a silly idea.'" (Kuh, Berman, p. 233)

MoMA situates Gotham News within de Kooning's Woman to Landscape period, 1950-1956, as the painting follows shortly after his notorious third Woman series. Tough, grotesque, and aggressive, these three-quarter portraits of female figures are characterized by their big breasts and huge teeth, wild eyes and a general carnal knowledge. Aside from their garish irritation, the works indeed bothered the artist as much as they upset his critics.

The Feast of San Gennaro Begins, and A Cold Front Arrives

The popular annual Feast of San Gennaro has begun.

While famous for its abundant opportunities to overindulge in food and drink, Little Italy's Feast of San Gennaro, now in its 85th year, is at heart a religious festival, a celebration of the Patron Saint of Naples. On September 19, 1926, immigrants from Naples who lived along Mulberry Street decided to maintain their homeland tradition of honoring San Gennaro on his saint's day. Over the years, the feast has expanded in duration from one day to several days with multiple events and, of course, many chances for feasting.

First day of the 85th Feast of San Gennaro, Mulberry Street, Little Italy. September 15, 2011

A waiter awaits customers a the Feast of San Gennaro, Mulberry Street, Little Italy

Downtown Beauty: Louise Nevelson and Jean Dubuffet

Not too many regular folk I know have business to do at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but it's worth taking a trip downtown to Maiden Lane and Liberty Street (converging just past William St.) to visit, or at least revisit, the triangular park just to the east of the bank - Louise Nevelson Plaza. At times over the past few years, Nevelson's lyrical steel structures, titled Shadows and Flags (1977), have been somewhat obscured by the plaza's own renovation.

Louise Nevelson Plaza, as seen from Chase Manhattan Plaza.
William Street (west side of plaza), Maiden Lane (north) and Liberty Street (south)

Around the corner and up the stairs at Chase Manhattan Plaza, Jean Dubuffet's fantastical Groupe de Quatres Arbres (1972) still surprises, and, in fact, the Chase plaza's elevation provides a perfect vantage point to look at the Nevelson pieces from on high. Handsome artwork by a woman and a pretty work by a man are frequently worth checking out, especially in tandem.

at the top of the stairs from William Street, Jean Dubuffet's Groupe de Quatres Arbres.

Dubuffet's Group of Four Trees (the English translation) came first, in 1972, a gift by bank chairman David Rockefeller for the plaza in front of the new Chase Manhattan Bank. The building already included the recessed curved Sunken Garden designed by Isamu Noguchi. Originally, architect Gordon Bunshaft had approached Alberto Giacometti to design a sculptural grouping for the plaza, but the artist grew ill and died in 1966, with the work unrealized. Chase's art committee decided on the selection of Dubuffet's whimsical curvy artwork, a black and white sculpture that contrasts with the straight modernist lines of the building, ten years after the building's construction. The grouping of four trees looks light enough to sail away with a strong wind. In fact, it's heavy, made of fiberglass resin affixed over a sturdy aluminum frame. The sculpture belongs to a series Dubuffet created called "L'Hourloupe," his invented name for a grotesque wonderland, the word a play on notions of roaring and hooting.

Chase Manhattan Plaza, Dubuffet's Groupe de Quatres Arbres

Considered one of the earliest champions of "outsider" art, or more precisely Art Brut, a phrase he coined, French painter and sculptor Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (1901 – 1985) moved away from a classical training in art toward an emotionally informed art practice. In addition to being a celebrated painter (MoMA held his first retrospective in 1962), he amassed an important collection of outsider art. When Rockefeller contacted him for the Chase commission, he was in his late 60s and well-known in New York art circles. Pace Gallery began showing his work in 1968. With the commission, Dubuffet moved to a new studio on the outskirts of Paris at Périgny-sur-Yerres, one that soon expanded to accommodate increasing demand. The unveiling of Groupe de Quatres Arbres in 1972 was followed by an exhibition at MoMA and other exhibitions in London and Paris.

A Walk to St. Paul's Chapel and to the World Trade Center

On Saturday, September 10, I walked south on Broadway from near my place in the Village all the way down to St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway at Vesey Street. The first few blocks of my walk seemed rather normal, just another Saturday in the city, but south of Canal Street, a sizable police force on the street indicated that life was far from normal.



One way I felt like spending my 911 remembrance weekend was to attend the brief service the church has held every day at 12:30 pm to offer prayers for social justice and peace. In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, St. Paul's Chapel became an important makeshift emergency and community center for families and first responders. While it continues to offer religious services, the chapel also functions as a museum of sorts, with exhibits illustrating its remarkable history from colonial days to the present. But 911 is its most remembered story for those of us living, and the fact that the chapel survived at all gives the site a sense of the miraculous. But it's a down to earth sort of miracle, a testimony to how individuals in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy just instinctively rose up to help other people.



The chapel's fence is currently covered in white ribbons of remembrances. Volunteers were offering to anyone passing by to take a ribbon and write a few words of remembrance. After attending the peace service, I got my ribbon, wrote my mother's name on it, and tied it on the fence. My mother, living in Dallas, Texas on September 11, 2001, was 85 years old and in good health, but the events of that day so depressed her that she abruptly became ill and died five weeks later. I've heard anecdotal evidence that her situation was not uncommon.



As St. Paul's churchyard is directly across the street from the World Trade Center site, I wandered over to observe the heightened security and event preparations for Sunday. A rather surreal scene presented itself, as a large outdoor screen was broadcasting a walkthrough by Mayor Bloomberg and city officials of the dedication of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum scheduled for Sunday morning.

A Walk Into the Night: Fashion's Night Out 2011

On Fashion's Night Out, a festive atmosphere pervades the evening, out on the streets and in the boutiques, especially in fashion-rich SoHo. Meeting new people requires little effort, and a little champagne and a little chocolate, or a lot of it, helps to get the conversations flowing. Given the nature of the event, everyone looks pretty great.

Looking over a blue Adidas mannequin's shoulder at the Diane von Furstenberg store across the street.
Wooster Street, SoHo.

Chanel store, Spring and Wooster.

Dancing in the windows at Betsey Johnson, Wooster Street.
The store was full of pinkness.

New York Museum Exhibitions, Fall 2011: A Selected List, With Openings in September, October, and November

View updated Winter 2011-2012 listings here.




Scroll down for complete list of 2011 Fall exhibitions.

Preview of Fall 2011 Museum Exhibitions

The Fall 2011 museum season may be notable for several potentially outstanding exhibitions, but certainly a big story concerns the re-openings of two museums. The National Academy Museum at 1083 Fifth Avenue, the mansion once home to Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, will unveil its renovated galleries in September with a Will Barnet retrospective and exhibitions to show off the permanent collection. The museum will offer free admission and art class for its opening weekend - Friday, September 16 through Sunday, September 18.

In November - 11/11/11, to be precise - the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library (see below) on Central Park West will reveal its airy new look, the most ambitious renovation for the building since the 1930s. Upon entering the museum, visitors should see an immediate change - hanging above the admissions desk, a Pop Shop ceiling mural by Keith Haring. The design overhaul will include architectural features previously tucked away, floorcases exhibiting the finds of amateur archaeologists, digital screens illustrating exhibits, and a Stephen Starr restaurant highlighting small plates from the Veneto region.

New-York Historical Society, Admissions area under “Pop Shop” ceiling, a gift from the Keith Haring Foundation Rendering: Platt Byard Dovell White Architects.

Beginning this week, several museums commemorate the events of September 11 with special exhibits. Foremost among them, of course, is the new National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, dedicated to to the commemoration as its chief mission. The museum will open to victims' families on the 10th anniversary of the attacks and then the following day to the general public (reserved advance passes required). Among the cultural institutions - the Brooklyn Museum opens Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered; the ICP offers a selection  of indelible images with Remembering 9/11; MoMA's PS1 exhibits work by 41 artists (including the George Segal sculpture below) addressing a range of responses; New Museum unveils a 911 commemoration by artist Elena del Rivero; and the New-York Historical Society will present photographs, letters, and objects in Remembering 9/11. A few of these exhibits last a short time, while others remain on view for several months. The Skyscraper Museum will offer free admission on Saturday, September 10th and Sunday, September 11th. On a final note, the most powerful public art response to 911, Tribute in Light, will illuminate the skies over Lower Manhattan beginning at dusk on Sunday, September 11 and ending the following dawn. (See more about the Tribute at this post on NewYorkology.)

From the exhibit September 11 at MoMA PS1.

GEORGE SEGAL. Woman on a Park Bench. 1998. Bronze sculpture with white patina, metal bench. 52 x 72 1/2 x 37 1/2”. Courtesy The George and Helen Segal Foundation and Carroll Janis. © 2011 The George and Helen Segal Foundation; licensed by VAGA, NY

Of the artist-inspired exhibitions, several are worthy of note. Beginning with an artist more well known for his writing, Asia Society presents sixty works on paper by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Novel Prize-winning poet, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Brooklyn Museum will exhibit the great series, Eva Hesse Spectres 1960, nineteen loosely representational paintings by the young artist. Similarly, the Frick Museum will look at another artist at the beginnings of his career with Picasso's Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition. The Morgan will exhibit seventeen drawings and three letters by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) from all phases of his artistic life. Of contemporary work, surely one of the most dazzling will be the New Museum's Carsten Höller: Experience, the first New York survey of an artist known for disorienting light installations and other challenges to the senses.

Oh, and de Kooning. MoMa's exhaustive multi-media retrospective of the groundbreaking artist, filling all galleries of the museums's sixth floor, should be a much-discussed blockbuster. It's coming soon, opening on September 18.

At MoMA - de Kooning: A Retrospective September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012
Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997)
Gotham News 1955
Oil, enamel, charcoal, and newspaper transfer on canvas. 69 x 79” (175.3 x 200.7 cm)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr.
© 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mark on your Fall arts calendar several thematic exhibitions featuring multiple artists. Beginning September 9, Fluxus, that international multidisciplinary collaborative of resourceful creatives (John Cage, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Joseph Beuys, and many more) gets the spotlight at NYU's Grey Art Gallery. A few weeks later, MoMA will exhibit the group's innovative publications in its Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries. Of particular interest to photographers, look for The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 at the Jewish Museum. The Photo League, operating in Manhattan from 1936 to 1951, believed in infusing photo making with a strong social consciousness. Another sort of informed political and social sensibility informs the Met's grand presentation of satirical cartoons with one of its many exhibitions, Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine. Many more exhibitions await description, but perhaps it's best to wrap up the Fall 2011 preview here - on the funny stuff.

The list below will be regularly updated.

The Island Holiday: Picturesque Scenes from a New York City Vacation

I never made it out of town this summer. While I did take some time off from regular editing and writing tasks, I mainly stayed within the confines of the island of Manhattan. I did manage to visit Brooklyn a couple of times.

Brooklyn Heights Promenade. August 12, 2011. 5:32 p.m.

I never stopped walking, however.

East River Esplanade. August 18, 2011, 12:51 p.m.

I suppose I tried to assuage my longing for a traditional vacation - and, no, I never made it to New York beaches, alas - with long sojourns in the parks and along the waterfront.

Battery Park, New York Harbor, August 26, 2011. 10:17 a.m.

The approach of a hurricane, one that touched my part of the city relatively lightly, seemed to reinforce the city's geographic characteristics as a maritime metropolis.

Hudson River Park, August 27, 2011. 1:44 p.m.

While walking the promenades, river walks, and pathways in the city parks over the past few weeks, it looked to me as if Nature was insisting on the upper hand. For a couple of days, Nature won.