page_title: The Gates
section_title: Installation
hierarchical_section_title: The Gates / Fabrication / Installation
caption_attribution_description: English: One of the many metal base parts of The Gates art installation. The photograph was taken in Central Park in New York City near the corner of 79th Street and 5th Avenue.
context_page_description: The Gates were a group of gates comprising a site-specific work of art by Bulgarian artist Christo Yavacheff and French artist Jeanne-Claude, known jointly as Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The artists installed 7,503 vinyl "gates" along 23 miles of pathways in Central Park in New York City. From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric. The exhibit ran from February 12, 2005 through February 27, 2005.
  The books and other memorabilia distributed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude refer to the project as The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 in reference to the time that passed from the artists' initial proposal until they were able to go ahead with it.
  The Gates were greeted with mixed reactions. Some people loved them for brightening the bleak winter landscape and encouraging late-night pedestrian traffic in Central Park; others hated them, accusing them of defacing the landscape. It was seen as an obstruction to bicyclists, who felt that the gates could cause accidents, although cycling was not legal on those paths.
context_section_description: On Feb 13, 2004, work began on the installation of the project. During the week of March 17, the park filled with workers using forklift vehicles to move the rectangular steel plates into position all over Central Park. There were small signs placed on every walkway in the park with alphanumeric codes which the workers used to place the metal plates onto the designated spots.
  By April 10th, most of the rectangular metal plates were positioned. All had small orange plastic markers sticking up two feet (around half a meter) from each end, possibly intended to help people find the base plates if they were covered with snow.  A major snow storm on January 22 and extreme cold hampered progress.
  On Monday, February 7, 2005, over 100 teams of eight workers each, wearing grey uniform smocks, began erecting the gates and bolting them to the base plates. The artists specified the color as saffron but many local observers described it as orange. The fabric hung from the crossbars at the top, 16 feet (5 m) high, from which it was unfurled on opening day, February 12. The most common width seems to have been 11 feet (3 m) although the width varied, depending on the width of the path, from 5 feet 6 inches to 18 feet.
caption: During construction: one of the many metal base parts (Feb. 6)
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