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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