The Gates

The long awaited project phenomenon that is due to make art history, The Gates, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Given permission by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on January 22, 2003, the project is set to be mounted in Central Park in New York City February 12th of this year.

The planned project is to resemble a golden river. Thus consisted to 7500 gates in total standing 16 feet (4.87 meters) high with a width changing from 5' 6" to 18 feet (1,67 m to 5,48 meters) going along the edges of the Central Park pathways. Saffron colored fabric panels suspended from the horizontal top part of the gates will come down to approximately 7 feet ( 2,13 meters) above the ground. Each gate will be spaced at 12 foot (3,65 meter) from each other, but might vary where trees expand above the walkways allowing the synthetic woven panels to wave towards the next gate and be seen from far away through the leafless branches of the trees.

The construction itself is a big development in itself. There are to be hundreds of residents to help in the project for temporary employment doing the following things:

Manufacturing and assembling of the gates structures,

Installation workers,

Maintenance teams around the clock, in uniform and with radios,

Removal workers.

The work is consisted of a lot of materials that, in the end, will be recycled at an assembly plant in Queens,NY. The materials are as follows:

Ð'* 5,290 US Tons of steel (4,799 Metric Tons) (10,580,000 pounds) (equal to 2/3 the steel in the Eiffel Tower) for 15,000 specially designed steel footing weights, varying between 615 and 837 pounds each, according to the width of the gate, (279 - 379 Kg

Ð'* 315,491 linear feet (60 miles) (96.5 Km.) of Vinyl tube, 5 inch x 5 inch square, (12,7 x 12,7 cm.) extruded in saffron color, recyclable, specially designed, (for each gate: 2 vertical 16 feet long (4,87 meter), and one horizontal (varying between 6 and 18 feet, because the width of the walkways varies)

Ð'* 15,000 specially designed, recyclable, cast aluminum upper corner reinforcements which hold together the