Patrick Foye, the plain-speaking director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is obliged to attend quite a few ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
When a new underground walkway opened in Lower Manhattan a few years ago he was there to say what a marvellous thing it was for New York City. He did the same when Delta Airlines extended Terminal Four of JFK airport.
But when it came to the opening of a stegosaurus-shaped railway station at the World Trade Center this week, Mr Foye said he wasn’t going. He did not like the so-called Calatravasaurus — it was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava — and felt that the $4 billion it had cost might have been better spent elsewhere.
Not everyone at the Port Authority agreed, and its board of governors put out a statement saying they would do something when the place was up and running. Yet there was to be no ceremony when the vast, ribbed hub of the station opened to the public this week. Workmen simply removed the barricades holding back a throng of New Yorkers, a foreman said, “OK” — and there was a rush for the entrance.
“I went to the opening of another station recently,” Mary Anderson, 64, a retired editor, told me as we plunged down an escalator to a white marble corridor. We emerged in the belly of the skeletal beast. “Well, it’s really lofty,” she added.
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A stream of gawkers surged into the hall behind us, their heads tilted back, their iPhones aloft. It was a cold, clear day, and everyone was bundled up. Then, through the swelling crowds, came four men in fine suits, bareheaded.
All appeared made up for television and seemed to glow in the cool afternoon light that filled the hall. Ahead of them was a middle-aged man in a spotless blue suit, and a young woman in a white blouse and skirt. It was Mr Calatrava, come to see his station, with his daughter Sophia. “When I saw it I was almost going to cry,” she told me. Now 20, she was at his side at the groundbreaking ceremony a decade ago. “I released the doves!” she exclaimed. “I have seen him work on it so hard. I have seen how much it means to him. It has come to mean a lot to my family.”
Mr Calatrava waved to the workers watching from a balcony; a tall, burly railway worker shook his hand and said: “You did a good job, man.”
What about the cost, someone asked? “I consider New York the world capital,” he replied. “We have been learning from New York, from Grand Central Station, from the enormous civil monuments that this city has built.”
He pointed towards the eastern rump of the stegosaurus. “There is this gap there, it is called ‘the wedge of light’ in the masterplan,” he said. Each morning at nine, “the sun enters at the time of the tragedy” — the first plane struck the north tower of the old World Trade Center at 8.46am, the second hit the south tower at 9.03. “The roof is retractable,” Mr Calatrava said, pointing up at the ribs above us. “People will be here every year on September 11.”
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The ribs, pulled back, will frame the Freedom Tower, another costly symbol of New York’s revival.
Have you ever felt that The Phantom of the Opera would be better if the Phantom were also a trapeze artist? And what if, during that opening number in Oklahoma! about the corn being as high as an elephant’s eye, an actual circus elephant appeared, for illustrative purposes? Well, a circus of a slightly different kind is coming to Broadway: Cirque du Soleil, with a new show called Paramour. It will feature 22 “globally recognised acrobats and 16 singers, dancers and actors, mashed together”, according to Scott Zeiger, managing director of the company’s new theatrical department. “We’ve created a hybrid.”
Cirque du Soleil usually produces sprawling visual extravaganzas with only the vaguest hint at a storyline. Mr Zeiger insisted, however, that the somersaults could not be gratuitous. Just as a tap-dancing number might serve the story of Guys and Dolls, so the sight of a lady being tossed from a flying trapeze will advance the plot of Paramour, which contains, at its heart, a love triangle between a young man, a young woman and a film director. “It’s a unique new art form,” Mr Zeiger declared.
Eleanor Alter, a big name among New York celebrity lawyers, had a bone to pick with the media this week. “Who here is from the New York Daily News?” she demanded after a hearing in the custody dispute between her client, Madonna, and Guy Ritchie. Ms Alter said the paper had printed a photo that made her look like “a 400-year-old midget gorilla”. She added: “The Post didn’t print the picture — they were kind.” Was it the lighting, or the angle of the frame? No, it was her client, Ms Alter said. “I suppose we all look like that beside Uma Thurman.”