Today's rainy forecast has prompted officials to postpone the dedication of Jim Power's mosaic poles at the reconstructed Astor Place from today to Thursday...
Via the EVG inbox...
Join us in Honoring Jim Power and Dedicating the Mosaic Poles at Astor Place
Thursday, Dec. 1, 4:30 pm
South Plaza, Astor Place
Celebrate the Astor Place Mosaic Trail light poles, honor artist Jim Power and recognize the dozens of private individuals and organizations who have made the restoration project possible.
After remarks by local advocates at the unveiling ceremony, Jim Power, will lead a tour of the restored Mosaic Poles, explaining the inspirations and stories of each. The event also highlights the continued fundraising needs in order to ensure the project is completed to Power's vision. For further event information click here.
You can read more about the return of the lamp posts at DNAinfo ... B + B ... and Untapped Cities.
To date, five of seven poles have been returned to Astor Place.
Previously on EV Grieve:
The first of Jim Power's restored mosaic light poles has returned to Astor Place
More Mosaic light poles arrive at Astor Place
18 comments:
Dedication the Mosaic Poles at Astor Place will take place on thursday followed by a corporate takeover of Astor Place friday, saturday and sunday.
how many dedications are they going to have for this bleak concrete graveyard?
sh=ould have taken all the funds expended (and to be expended) and just repaired the cube and the area, planted a few trees, installed a few benches. then it would have been a fitting resting place for the powers mosaics.
these corporate non-events just provide press opportunities for minor "officials" but provide nothig for the neighborhood.
the old parking lot had more spirit than this "improvement". it is now an ode to chase, cooper union, and nothingness.
Jim, the Mosaic Man, Power deserves much recognition for all of his years of service to the East Village. He has been a fixture in our landscape of formerly interesting and curious living that we can't see much of around here anymore. Support this wildly interested/interesting and passionately creative neighbor on Thursday. He deserves an East Village parade, dammit!
Really like Jim Power's work but man, it's looking sadder and more out of place every day. That pic with the CVS in the background is so sad looking. The character of this place has been paved over, and the mosaics are little more than doleful relics of what is long disappeared. They are damn near archaeological at this point.
they look kind of odd just sticking up like that. weren't the originals attached to poles?
Yeah. These are just awful. Like amputated legs.
I had originally thought they were preserved in order to be reinstalled as working street lights. (no reason they couldn't have been)
In the existing context, these just look weak and pathetic.
They look stupid... And sad. Hate them. They are not stand-alone art pieces. They were originally part of the streetscape - the base of a lamp post many times running up the pole itself. And they were dotted here and there on the sidewalks - no rhyme or reason. Now positioned the way they are, they are for tourists to take pictures - something odd but safe and very sanitized. Our corporate rulers are throwing us a bone. Oh, look what we're doing for you. KEEP THEM. OUR MEMORIES ARE WORTH MORE... Ok, maybe not to Jim Powers. But still...
I hate the corporate elements as much as anyone but I think the new configuration is vastly superior to the previous one. It's faster, less congested, and safer (as a pedestrian) to walk through Astor place now.
Also, will there be a new post on Rivington House now that the De Blasio/Rosen emails were released? Hate to think that they would get away with burying the news by releasing them on Thanksgiving.
you people will complain about anything. Maybe Jim reads these comments and he's excited. Someone call the Waaaaaaaambulance.
Seriously. It's a sterile area now (despite the filth that the brunch crowd generates). We know that the neighborhood is no more, but it's cool that Jim managed to save a small piece of it. That guy fought hard to keep art happening around here. Let's each ask ourselves what we do for our community.
It's not his fault that Astor Place is weird (not good weird) now.
@ 1:49 PM
Take your selfie in front of the poles, and then you can catch your bus back to Idaho.
Given that they are no longer actually, in fact, what they were meant to be, I think these would have been much nicer installed somewhere inside Tompkins Sq.
Sorry Manny,
Pedestrian flow-through is much worse than it used to be. And there is no reason that it couldn't have been much better than it used to be instead.
I'm not grumpy. I'm not just-piss-on-anything-thats-new.
It just simply really is a bad design.
They don't look the same.
It's just a matter of time until someone ties a hammock between those two poles and takes a nice long nap.
Interesting that they have the ceremony for non-working street lights at 430 PM, precisely the time when the sun sets. So the damn thing will be held in the dark?!?
5:38 I respect that you feel that way but I disagree. I'm not an urban designer so I don't know if it's technically a good design but I do know that it's easier for me to cross the roads and there's more room to walk AND to walk around slow walkers, thank God. If the MTA parked the busses on the opposite side of the street or at least further back of the intersection then I would have zero complaints. It's still better than before when cars could travel both ways.
More room for capitalism and less room for art. Oh wait, we'll let you re-install the art in a meaningless way, right, cause it's just symbolic art now, like this place is becoming a symbol and brand of what was once a proper neighborhood/community.
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