Coachella promoters launching New York festival

The promoters of the annual Coachella music festival in southern California are planning a New York-area version this summer, sources say.

The event, which will not carry the Coachella brand, will take place at Liberty State Park, just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan in New Jersey. The park has hosted a handful of concerts in recent years, most notably a Radiohead show shortly before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The new event gives promoters AEG Live/Goldenvoice a major summer presence in the area, where it will compete with the new Vineland festival, which will be held August 8-10 on a 500-acre, farm in Vineland, N.J., about 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, an announcement is expected in the coming days revealing the lineup for this year's Coachella festival, to be held April 25-27 in Indio, Calif.

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New York City to Install Freestanding Waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist whose installation The Weather Project drew two million people to the Tate Modern in 2003 and 2004, has designed what will likely be New York City's biggest public art project since Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates: a series of freestanding waterfalls in the East River. Kate Taylor reports in the New York Sun that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Public Art Fund are scheduled to announce Eliasson's project at the South Street Seaport tomorrow. According to a source whom the mayor told about the project, the waterfalls will rise about sixty to seventy feet above the water—more than half as high as the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Someone who was briefed on the waterfalls project last year said that, at that time, it was estimated to cost between nine million and eleven million dollars.

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Wall Art Included

In this multilayered city, finding evidence of a building’s previous incarnation is nothing new. This summer, the Times reported that developers at 151 Wooster Street had uncovered a long-lost graffiti mural by Fab 5 Freddy and Jean-Michel Basquiat and managed to peel it off the wall for a planned exhibition. And not too far away, at 260 West Broadway, the architects Todd Ernst and Frank Servidio knew that the spot in which Ernst was building a maisonette might also contain a treasure. It had once been exhibition space for the School of Visual Arts, and they’d heard that a painting by one of its most famous students, Keith Haring, was buried somewhere within. As soon as they got the job in 2001, the architects began to search, and it didn’t take long to confirm the rumor. “It was like discovering an Egyptian tomb,” says Ernst. Within a week, they’d found a wall of those famous chunky curlicues, hidden behind a closet used for coats and AV gear. “The fact that it actually survived is amazing,” says Ernst. “It’s next to a sprinkler pipe and it’s made of shoe polish and alcohol, and it’s water soluble.”

Six years and one heavy renovation later, the 8,000-square-foot triplex is on the market. The long delay was, in part, caused by the death of the original buyer in the September 11 attacks; his widow subsequently sold the apartment to a group of investors that includes developer Richard Saunders. “When we bought the place, she reserved the right to move [the painting], but they couldn’t,” says Saunders, explaining that the painting is on a concrete wall, and trying to remove it would turn it into gravel. “Because it’s not movable, it’s really just part of the space,” he says, “like the ceiling height or the view.” He adds that the discovery was not without its headaches. “We thought it was something that needed to be preserved, but we didn’t know how to. The more we spoke to people, the more different the options were. Some wanted to actually add to it, others wanted to Plexiglas it, but it was all too scary for me.”

This brings about a peculiar question: How do you price such an apartment? On canvas, the work would easily cost millions. On the wall of a condo? “It’s probably another $100,000,” suggests listing broker Lee Summers of Sotheby’s International Realty, who says she’s fielded tons of calls since the property went on the market on Thanksgiving. “It’s valueless except for the person who lives there.” After all, she explains, the apartment has to work as a living space, mural or no mural. Buyers who can afford the $16.995 million asking price “can always buy a Haring. But they have to live in the apartment.”

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Fame Slept Here

(Photo: Courtesy of Prudential Douglas Elliman)

156 WEST 22ND STREET

The Facts: Four-story brownstone with ground-floor commercial space and three residential lofts.
Asking Price: $6.5 million.
Agent: Wigder Frota, Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The Chelsea Art Scene, 1936 Edition
As the art world’s center of commerce, Chelsea only supplanted Soho a few years ago. But artists were there long before—notably Willem de Kooning, who kept a studio in this building on West 22nd Street for a decade. In their 2005 biography of the artist, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan explain that he moved here in 1936, with a girlfriend, Juliet Browner—illegally, as the building was zoned for commercial use only. (It had no hot water.) De Kooning kept it spotless, knocking off work early each Saturday to scrub. The couple gave regular parties and socialized with Martin Craig, a sculptor who lived downstairs.

Browner didn’t stick around, but within a couple of years, de Kooning met his wife, Elaine Fried, and they settled in the same building, one floor up. There, he constructed built-in furniture and overhauled the floor-through into a cozy place to live. (They had trouble sharing it, however: They painted at opposite ends of the apartment, growing irritable at each other.) At $35 a month, it was also a little too expensive; as jobs dried up during the war years, de Kooning’s income did, too, and they were evicted in December 1946.

Today, the building has been refashioned into three bright bathrooms, and the ground floor’s a pet boutique. The tin ceilings overhead, however, are the same ones that sheltered the de Koonings. (As of press time, the building had been temporarily pulled off the market, but, says broker Wigder Frota, it’ll return in the spring.)

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