The Gates and The Games
by Wiley Norvell

Never come between a tourist and its prey.

"What do y'all mean you're out of magnets? I came all the way from Georgia!" My eyes narrowed as I strained to finish the distraught patron's thought, "...to buy a refrigerator magnet?"

From my vantage point, it was hard to discern Central Park's main event last month. It was a toss-up between the largest public art installation in New York's history and the Central Park Conservancy's line of shoddily made "The Gates" merchandise. Buyer beware — the $45 sweatshirts thread and the $20 coffee mugs crack if you look at them the wrong way.

Despite working three days a week in Central Park, I didn't see much billowing saffron. As a vendor for The Gates project, my view rarely left the logo-emblazoned baseball caps and commemorative key chains. The only banners truly visible last month were those of the NYC2012 Olympic bid. The lampposts ringing Columbus Circle announced the city's Olympic fervor. "Every Neighborhood Will Celebrate!" read one sign, the word "Will" colored an especially threatening shade of red. Caught between two of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's pet projects, this recent public spectacle bodes poorly for what could be the next. If a 16-day art exhibition put the public squares ringing Central Park under the foot of merchandisers, how will the Consumer Capital of the World handle the 17 most profitable days in sport?

At The Gates, our outposts of capitalism were hemmed in by the strictly anti-corporate bent of the artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The enigmatic couple were initially so shocked by the conservancy's merchandising effort that they actually closed down all venues until large signs disavowing their involvement could be distributed. Even so, their good taste barely tempered the Central Park Conservancy's determination to extract every last dollar from the project; the grand public squares ringing Central Park succumbed to merchandise roadblocks out to waylay out-of-towners and residents alike.

Now that The Gates have disbanded, Mayor Bloomberg is doing his utmost to clear my guilty conscience, boasting of the $254 million brought into the city by the project and the more modest sum the Central Park Conservancy raised via its dozen or so merchandise posts (solid kiosks pulled down $25,000 on a day, about the equivalent of two hot Manhattan restaurants on Friday night). This, of course, is small fare by comparison with the tourist and sponsorship dollars at stake with the Olympics. NBC alone sold $1 billion in advertising for the Athens games.

That public spectacle breeds profit in New York goes without question. Athens forsook most commercial sponsorship (dismantling 10,000 billboards during the Olympic buildup) in favor of a self-proclaimed "Heritage Games."

They paid for their audacity with public debt. That's not how we do business. As happened with The Gates, New York will only take on the Olympic games at minimal cost and maximum profit. It was an awkward but necessary compromise for a duo of artists with socialist roots; it's a trade-off we'll make with reckless abandon when the Olympics come to town.

There will be millions to be made by bringing in bigger, more invasive billboards and hawking cheap merchandise around every corner. NYC2012's current $15 million ad blitz (proudly described by our mayor as being "in everybody's face") is merely a sneak preview of the full-scale Olympic marketing push to come.

As with The Gates, the quiet casualty will be New York's fragile public spaces, condemned to rest under the wheels of idling rent-a-vans and pushcarts while the dollars roll in. And whereas Christo and Jeanne-Claude have promised that not a gate (let alone a refrigerator magnet) will remain in Central Park, I've heard no such assurance from NYC2012.

E-mail Wiley Norvell at wileynorvell@yahoo.com.