BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Standing on one of the new Whitney Museum of American Art’s outdoor terraces, one can take in the whole sweep of the surrounding neighborhood. According to the museum, this was the intent: to have the terraces face inward toward the city, as opposed to outward toward the Hudson River.
(Plus, right now, the view directly west of the museum is dominated by Gansevoort Peninsula, still occupied by unsightly garbage trucks and sheds. A park is coming on Gansevoort — but it will be a while.)
From the museum’s terraces, one can visually track how the Meatpacking District has evolved. Just to the north is the Standard Hotel, completed in 2009, perched on a massive trestle, straddling the High Line below. The elevated park opened the same year and immediately became one of the city’s top tourist attractions.
Last Sunday, the High Line was teeming with people swirling about below tree boughs blooming with white and purple petals — almost like some sort of wildly busy Jackson Pollock painting when viewed from the Whitney’s terraces above.
Over on Washington St., a former row of meat lockers — with forgotten names like Lamb Unlimited and Diamond Meats — has been transformed into an office building sporting a twisting black metal lattice and grass lawns. It’s the new home of the cutting-edge cell-phone giant Samsung.
Farther to the west can be espied the rusty former head-house arch for Pier 54, where the Titanic’s dazed and exhausted survivors disembarked. Barry Diller and Diane van Furstenberg plan to create a glittering new $130 million “arts island” there — Pier55 — that would attract top performers.
Unlike Hudson Yards, however, the Meatpacking District’s evolution wasn’t planned in one fell swoop, but has happened organically, one step after the other. The last remnant of the once-thriving Meat Market is still visible just below the museum in the “co-op building,” which carries a deed restriction that has preserved it for market use.
Now, rising majestically at the center of it all, is the new $422 million Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum, which will officially open to the public on Fri., May 1. First Lady Michelle Obama will be on hand on Thurs., April 30, joining Mayor Bill de Blasio and museum officials at the dedication ceremony.
On Sat., May 2, the Whitney throw a free block party for the neighborhood. Sponsored by Macy’s, there will be karaoke, puppetry, poetry, mapmaking, music and more.
Rising eight stories tall and stretching along Gansevoort St. between Washington and West Sts., the museum boasts light-filled gallery spaces and high ceilings. The opening show, “America Is Hard to See,” features more than 600 works from the museum’s collection of American art, mixing pieces well known with those rarely seen, in an attempt to shake up conceptions of the artistic canon.
There’s a wall-length painting by Lee Krasner done right after her husband, Jackson Pollock’s, death; plus “Calder’s Circus,” a diorama of small wire sculptures of big-top performers by Alexander Calder, with which he would do live performances; as well as Willem de Kooning’s famously frenetic “Woman and Bicycle”; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cynical “Hollywood Africans”; and an in-your-face nude by Carroll Dunham, father of Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame.
Works by Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe and Thomas Hart Benton hang near those of other artists whose names are unfamiliar to most.
The museum’s top floors can all be accessed by exterior stairways. Walking down the sleek metal-grate steps, one has the feeing of climbing down through a great clipper ship’s rigging. It also provides a nice breath of fresh air and a visual recharge after viewing each floor’s artworks.
The work is arranged chronologically, becoming more contemporary as you descend. Particularly poignant, in the ’60s section, in light of the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end, is Howard Lester’s video installation “One Week in Vietnam,” which rapidly flashes the names and photos of all the U.S. soldiers killed during a single week, while the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” plays along.
Even the bookstore / gift shop, on the first floor, has an open feeling: It has no walls.
Last Sunday, the museum was open for free for members.
“Oh, it’s wonderful,” said Harriette Silverberg Natkins, an Upper West Sider, after visiting the museum. “Have you been to the other Whitney? This one lets the art breathe.”
Standing on the plaza out front, Karen Groner, a designer from Bank St., said, “It’s visually beautiful inside. All three elevators are different. Each floor sort of has a different window configuration. And I love the wooden floors — besides its being really pretty, I think it works to dampen sound, as opposed to raw concrete floors. And I think the plaza is going to be a zoo all summer.”
Ting Chen, 23, an entrepreneur who grew up nearby in Chelsea and now lives in the Village, said she enjoyed the art on the seventh and eighth floors the most.
“I though the outdoor stairway was very cool,” she said. “Fresh air is a break.” With the Whitney’s presence, she said, the area is “getting a lot more dynamic.”
Will, however, the Whitney be a bit too dynamic? The place’s V.I.P. grand opening last Friday evening brought a reported crowd of 3,000 partiers to celebrate Downtown’s new art mecca. It was so packed, some people were reportedly worried about the safety of the art on the wall, according to the Post’s Page Six. Among the boldface names rubbing shoulders were artists Julian Schnabel and Kiki Smith, actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Dakota Fanning, singer Solange Knowles, “Noah” and “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky and Andre Balazs, who built The Standard Hotel, just two blocks away. Zoe Kravitz and St. Vincent spun tunes, and John Cale of Velvet Underground fame performed.
In addition to partying, the Whitney has been doing plenty of outreach to the community.
“I was there Friday night,” said Elaine Young, a member of Community Board 2 who lives on Jane St., a block away from the new museum. “There were probably 7,000 people. I said, ‘How is this different from a club?’ There was a bar on the ground floor and at least two or three bars on the other floors. … I had a Scotch.”
Over the past decade, Young and her neighbors have been vigilant about trying to keep the Meatpacking District’s nightlife revelry from becoming too loud and disruptive for the surrounding area.
“One thing the neighborhood is very weary of — they’re going to have a lot of events,” she noted. “All these terraces they have, we don’t want to see rock bands on them blaring on Friday night.”
Last Friday night, however, she said, around 11 p.m., a D.J. on one of the balconies was manning a soundboard and beaming out “a New Age-y thing.”
“It was kind of depressing and kind of droney,” said Young, who was looking down on the scene from the museum’s eighth-floor terrace. It wasn’t St. Vincent or Zoe Kravitz, though, she said, but a male D.J.
An e-mail was promptly fired off to a top Whitney community-relations official and, within 10 minutes, the throbbing tone had faded away.
Young said she and fellow Village activist Zach Winestine “negotiated a very complicated S.L.A. agreement” with the Whitney, under which Danny Meyer’s ground-floor restaurant will close at midnight Sunday to Thursday and 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday, with only six events with amplified sound on the terraces per year. The State Liquor Authority approved the stipulations, Young noted.
Although Young said they’ll “have to be very careful about use of the terraces,” over all, she’s bullish on the new museum.
“There’s always people who say it’s too much traffic, too much noise,” she said. “I think the Whitney brings a glow to the neighborhood.”
Ivy Brown has lived in the Triangle Building, at Ninth Ave. and W. 14th St., where she also runs a gallery, since long before the Meatpacking District’s transformation. From her central perch — a grandfathered residential apartment in the manufacturing-zoned enclave — she has watched the neighborhood evolve from meat hooks and transgender hookers to hotels, high-end boutiques, nightlife and now, high art.
“This is major,” she said of the Whitney. “And of all the major things — like the High Line and Chelsea Market — despite the massive wave of humanity that is about to come flooding in, we’re pretty excited. It’s cultural, it’s not a nightlife place, it’s not transient,” she said of the museum.
Because much of the museum’s concept is “indoors/outdoors,” Whitney officials gave a special presentation last week to the Meatpacking District Improvement Association, which Brown attended, about what is to be expected.
“They explained the philosophy,” Brown related. “They don’t want to mimic an old industrial building, but they want it to be in that flavor. The outdoor staircases are supposed to have the feeling of fire escapes, which I think is great.”
Brown also thinks it’s terrific that the museum’s terraces will be free for the public to use.
“Anybody can go to the outdoor spaces without paying a penny,” she noted.
Yearly membership for the museum will reportedly be $80 a year, which, by New York standards, seems almost affordable.
“Eighty dollars — I am so becoming a member,” Brown gushed. “That is so accessible.”
On the flip side, the neighborhood only keeps getting busier. On particularly nice weekends, she’ll gaze out her window and still be stunned to see massive crowds streaming along W. 14th St.
“Where do all the people come from? I’m gobsmacked,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘What’s the demonstration?’ Then I’ll realize, it’s just people going someplace around here.”
But Brown will deal with it the way she always has since the area started becoming a destination.
“I go to Chelsea Market at 9:30 in the morning and it’s mine,” she noted. “That’s how I’ll treat the Whitney.”
Is she, like Young, worried about the Whitney’s terraces turning into musical minarets, blasting beats out into the neighborhood?
“That’s kind of T.B.D. right now,” she said. “I’m not concerned. And they’ve shared contact numbers in case there are issues. Hopefully, it won’t come to that, but you never know.”
As for the music that Young dissed as drone-like, Brown said her friend was out walking her dog and heard it, and called it “the most magical sound. She thought it was phenomenal.”
Young noted that M.P.I.A. and the Chelsea Improvement Company will formally become the new Meatpacking Business Improvement District in about a month. The BID will have a novel Impact Area Advisory Committee, which will represent the concerns of residential neighbors living around the commercial BID’s edges, which could be helpful if the museum generates noise complaints or other issues.
Lauren Danziger, who will head the new BID, said the organization is eager to work with the museum and help incorporate it into the area. Unlike the two pseudo-BID organizations it will replace, the BID will be funded by a special tax assessment on property owners.
“The Whitney is a world-class art institution now located in a world-renowned neighborhood,” Danziger said. “It adds a spotlight on culture to an area already brimming with interesting and cutting-edge business. It’s true, the area has previously been known primarily as a nightlife hub, but the Whitney shines light on the truth of the neighborhood; there is so much depth of business located in the Meatpacking District.
“We do anticipate that there will be a major influx of visitors,” Danziger said, “and this is one of many reasons we’ve worked to create the Meatpacking BID, voted on and approved by the City Council last week. As the steward for the area, we knew we would not be able to support that district’s changing needs via a straight donation basis (at M.P.I.A. and C.I.C.). Forming the BID allows us to evolve with the neighborhood as it becomes increasingly visited.”
