Christo's "The Gates"
Christo's "The Gates", In Video and AR and a Dog Named Pencil
Click here to play video of Christo's Gates I filmed in 2005
I read yesterdays’ New York Times story on the former Soho loft at 48 Howard Street of the conceptual artists Christo and Jean Claude, which has become a “time capsule” since the couple’s deaths. I was reminded of the snowy February day in 2005 in which Christo and Jean Claude first unveiled their fabulous orange “Gates” in Central Park and I shot some video.
Seeing The Gates that day for the first time was like discovering a secret in plain sight—as a magical pathway of orange fabric waved through the transformed park. A hush was everywhere as bystanders passed in awe through some of the 7,503 saffron-hued gates of this public art installation that wove along 23 miles of the Park. Snow had fallen the night before and set the stage.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Gates, Bloomberg Connects posted this AR , an augmented reality experience, that allows visitors to engage with a portion of the work on their smartphones. Click here to download the app or use the QR code.
When I viewed The Gates I had just picked up a foster dog, Pencil, and was taking him for his first walk on a leash to view the Gates. He had never been outside and was tugging on the leash as I tried to shoot one-handed. I put the camera on auto-focus. As a result some of the SOTs are back-focused.
Fortuitously, I bumped into the artists and asked Jean Claude what she thought about the phenomenon of “artists as rockstars”- kind of a dumb question. Jean Claude protested, “ Don’t say that. We’re not rock-stars. We still live on the fifth floor with no elevator.”
The five-story building at 48 Howard Street is where, for roughly 50 years, the conceptual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude lived and worked. Much has changed in the neighborhood since the 1960s, when the couple first moved there, renting two floors for just $150 a month. The property value has gone up — the median rent for a property in SoHo these days is $7,750, according to Zumper — but inside, the home remains almost exactly as it was when they occupied it. The top-floor studio still has Christo’s sketches, art supplies neatly arranged in cookie tins and an unopened Coca-Cola bottle (their son, Cyril, loved Coke). Downstairs, where they ate and slept, trinkets and family photos surround the dining table and stools he built to furnish the space.
-Angela Korde, The New York Times, May 9, 2025
The couple met in Paris in the 50’s and brought two mattresses to the loft , a painting and a chair. They had been living in the Chelsea Hotel when the artist Charles Oldenberg suggested they check out 48 Howard Street where he had his studio.
Here are some photos by George Etheredge of the couple’s loft today
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The photos by George Etheredge of Christo and Jean Claude’s loft remind me of early Soho days when I moved to New York in 1976 to try to be a painter and worked as a cook on a New York harbor tugboat. I first lived at 27 Greene Street as a room-mate to Francoise Mouly, now the illustrations editor for The New York Yorker. She was then dating Art Speigelman, the Pulitzer-prize winning artist of the graphic novel Maus. We drank a lot of coffee as Art introduced me to books I should read. I was the only witness at their wedding at City Hall. It was a great time to live in New York City’s Soho those days, before gentrification destroyed this artistic quarter.
Pencil? Well, he’s another story. I thought I would only be offering a temporary shelter, care and love for this 12-year-old somewhat dodgy dog while he awaited placement in a “forever” home. However this was not to the case as nobody wanted to adopt this dog with cataracts. So he ended up mine and became my devoted muse.
