“Hey, you have a really great apartment!” would ordinarily be a very nice thing to hear. But when this particular sentence is uttered by a shirtless stranger leaning out of a window directly across the airshaft from your apartment, that is a whole other thing.

This is what happened to me one day when I was washing my kitchen window; I had the window pane swiveled all the way inward and the screen all the way up, and consequently I was very visible. “You sure work late,” the man added, calling out across the 20 feet that separated our buildings and smiling in a discomfiting manner. “You must be the hardest-working woman in the city.”  It took me a second to realize the implication—that he had been watching me.  A lot. (I do tend to write rather late, but ew.)

However, besides the obvious Peeping Tom “ick” factor, there was another basic transgression involved here. This man had broken the unwritten law most New Yorkers live by; he had destroyed the illusion of privacy that is necessary for our peace of mind.

Since we are almost always surrounded by people, we erect make-believe walls and pretend we are not seeing and hearing all that we do. This is a social contract we have all more or less agreed to. For instance, it is certainly easy to see what the person sitting next to you on the subway is reading, but for the most part you do not comment on it, lest you break into the little “transit cocoon” he has created. People all around us are having personal conversations we pretend not to hear (and which they pretend not to know we can hear)—in lines, on buses, in restaurants, in stores. We have to play the game or the walls will come tumbling down. If every person chimed in to our conversations every time we were on the phone walking down the street, we would lose our minds.

Of course,  often we feel drawn into strangers’ conversations when we see commonality—such as when we see someone carrying a program to a play we have just come from. I approve of engaging with strangers; but when it’s fairly obvious the person is trying to be private (for instance, if she is in her own home, thank you very much!) that is something that needs to be respected.  When we are in public, it’s often more acceptable. There is a certain amount of “mingling” we expect when we are in a situation together with strangers.

It’s when you are not anonymous—and when you are trapped, as you are in the workplace—that this crossing of boundaries can be especially problematic.

People really need their boundaries at the office. I have a friend who works in a newly redesigned office space, where the emphasis of the layout is on openness.  There are cubicles with low partitions in the center and glass offices along the walls.  Not only can people sometimes see and hear what is going on inside the glass offices, but also voices throughout the floor seem to carry. So much so that one woman who works in a cubicle—who talks somewhat loudly on the phone—complained of co-workers stationed way over on the other side of the room repeatedly coming up to comment on, or offer help regarding, phone calls she had made. These co-workers did not say, “Sorry, but I could not help overhearing you needed this report”; they just said, “Here’s the info you need.” Now the woman feels that everyone is listening to every word she says, and it is affecting her work.

Cubicles have been the corporate norm for years. But many companies are now configuring their workspaces to be even more “open”—to offer better “flow” and more light. This seems to be the trend. In fact, most new designs—whether they are office innovations or website revamps—seem to reflect the increased connectivity of our modern world, and the decrease in privacy. This means we need our “fake” boundaries more than ever.

I almost always put my blinds down when it gets dark, but I certainly don’t want to be aware of hiding from a specific neighbor. I don’t want to know who is living across the airshaft.  I don’t want to know about his life, I don’t want him to know about mine.

Togetherness is wonderful.  But a feeling of privacy is essential.  So you close your eyes and ears, and I’ll close mine.

Jeanne Martinet, aka Miss Mingle, is the author of seven books on social interaction. Read her blog at MissMingle.com.

Their selfishness literally seeps through the vents into our apartments.

Oh, sure, I believe people have a legal right to smoke in their homes—if they keep their smoke within the confines of their apartments.

That rarely happens. So let’s think about a great big new in-the-apartment smoking ban. At least in my building.

Granted, I’m cranky. My clothes smell like I’ve been clubbing in the 1980s. Is there a vent in my closet that I don’t know about? Beyond my space, I noticed a few minutes ago while in the laundry room that the odor there shifts from that Tide smell to the building workers’ cigarettes.

There will be no cessation in the smoking debate in this town. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently unveiled the latest front in what amounts to his administrative war. He wants city apartment buildings officially to go on record as to whether smoking is permitted in all indoor and outdoor locations, including—here’s the fun part—inside apartments.

Some smokers are horrified their mayor is reaching into their apartments. Not me. I’m thrilled that rude behavior hostile to my health is finally up for debate. These days, I like the idea of a building where nobody is smoking, not even the scuzzy-looking people by the front door. Those folks always seem like they walked out of The Grapes of Wrath. These untouchables seem so displaced that I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

Mostly, these days, I feel sorry for me. Cause I cannot even figure out where the smoke is coming from. Granted, I’m not alone. The building management sent out an announcement last month about the issue. “Many neighbors have voiced concerns over the smoke that comes through the vents, doorways and windows of neighbors who smoke cigarettes,” the flier said. “Secondhand smoke is extremely dangerous for asthmatics, the elderly and especially young children.”

Oh, asthma. Did I mention I was diagnosed with asthma after a couple of years in my building? Anyway, the building flier had three tips for residents: Smoke outside of the building; use a “smokeless ashtray,” something I’m skeptical about, especially since the jerks in my building are not buying them; or “quit—that’s the healthiest option for everyone.”

Critics, citing Bloomberg’s no-smoking policy in restaurants and bars and now parks, say he’s creating a nanny state. All I know is that I like breathing again. The mayor deserves credit for being largely ahead of his time on these issues. It only takes a visit to a city without these policies for a non-smoker to appreciate Nanny Bloomberg anew.

I get that there is another side to this issue, but there’s so much smoke in my apartment that I cannot see it clearly.

Oh, and not to sound old-fashioned, I’m not thrilled with the marijuana smoke, either. Or, more specifically, the incense on my floor that’s doing a lame-ass job of covering up the marijuana smoke.

Sorry, smokers, but at least I admit to the ugly stuff in the recesses of my mind. Earlier today I was walking on West 38th Street. Strolling behind a smoker in an ugly jacket (he evidently spends his dough on cigs and not clothes) as the awful smell wafted back toward my nostrils and lungs, I actually began to wonder whether even that awful little moment should be legal. Why should this dude be able to smoke on a busy sidewalk? I want fresh air, or the nearest possible approximation offered in this big town.

This is real life, not an episode of Mad Men.

Christopher Moore is a writer living in Manhattan. He’s available by email at ccmnj@aol.com and also on Twitter
(@cmoorenyc).

The name Etan Patz conjures up so much for so many in New York City.

If you’re under 30, it is likely to draw a blank stare, but for many others it’s different, particularly if you were growing up in the city around 1979, when Patz, a 6-year-old Soho boy, disappeared on his first solo trip to school.

“Mom used to say, ‘You’ll end up like Etan Patz and no one will ever see you again’ when I walked too far ahead in NYC as a kid,’” @AlexSalta wrote on Twitter last week. “It worked.”

Patz was a trending topic this week and last as investigators went back to a Soho basement to dig for clues with a new suspect in the case. It’s the kind of story that grips you every time it resurfaces, although it probably didn’t change behaviors as much as people think.

Peggy Schneider, naturally, was thinking about Patz this week, since she was in middle school in Manhattan when the boy disappeared—but then again, she thinks about Patz and his parents a lot.

“I can still see his smiling face; I have probably thought about it once a month for my entire life,” she said in a phone interview.

Her friend was Patz’ babysitter, so she had a personal connection, but even that was not enough to change her habits. She still traveled the city on her own as a young teen.

So did I and most of my friends. The city was less safe in the ’80s, yet many parents then were much less protective than they are now.

Columnist Lenore Skenazy got a lot of mileage a few years ago when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone, and has since expanded the column into a movement to promote raising “Free-Range Kids.” Her column would never have drawn the uproar 30 years ago that it did in 2008.

I was a few years older than Skenazy’s son when I began riding the subway with a friend, but around the 3rd grade, I began walking to school alone—of course, that simply involved crossing a street that my parents could see from our window. My friends and I would play ball after school with other neighborhood kids, and we managed to do it without refs or adult supervision.

Still, I didn’t have to cross any streets to get to the concrete “field,” and I know things will be different when my son reaches the age when we have to start making these impossible decisions. There is a lot to be said for letting kids figure it out for themselves, but the rub is deciding when to do it and how much to let go.

Schneider’s youngest sister, Zoe, 40, is a year older than Patz would be today. She doesn’t remember being reigned in much growing up, but somewhere between then and now, city parents began tightening the leashes for better and, perhaps, for worse.

She may be more tapped into this generation of New Yorkers than anyone; she is the organizer of Magic Garden, a large monthly party for people who grew up in the city, giving them a chance to meet people who don’t ask, “What was that like?”

She used to come home late at night from babysitting gigs when she was young, but her immediate neighborhood in Tudor City was shielded from cars. Now in Harlem, she said “it is really scary” to think about her children someday walking by themselves near so much traffic.

“Babysitting at age 9 is crazy, but it was what it was,” she said. “It all worked out and everyone made it through.”

Not that parents didn’t worry quietly. Mine are fuzzy about how Patz affected their thinking, but my mother does remember me taking the train to high school in the Bronx. It wasn’t all that long after Patz disappeared.

“I always say I spent four years looking out the window,” she told me.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

Jeanne Martinet, aka Miss Mingle, is the author of seven books on social interaction.

It can be a wonderful thing—that phone call that comes like a wish fulfilled when you don’t have plans, you don’t feel like working and you are deep in the doldrums. Suddenly, there is a friend’s voice saying, “I have tickets to a show tonight, are you by any chance free?” And voilà! Your evening is transformed into something enjoyable and unforeseen.

Last-minute invites—especially when they involve theatrical performances— are often things to be greatly appreciated. However, if you have a friend who only calls you at the last minute, you may not appreciate it so much. (“In about 45 minutes, I’m going to see this movie I’ve been wanting to see; want to go with me?” or “I’m sitting at this bar not far from you, why don’t you come out and join me?”) The people who are guilty of this kind of invite may call themselves free spirits, but is it really devilmay-care behavior or just devilish?

Sometimes, the last-minute invite is really what it sounds like, from someone to whom you are a last-minute consideration. Now, I want to be clear: I know many people who live and die by the relaxed, never-know-what-I-am-going-to-be-doing-tomorrow social credo. There are also those rather enviable people I meet who are members of a small but solid “crew” of friends, so that they don’t have to bother to make plans; their social life, while it may be a bit predictable, just happens automatically—albeit with the
same six or eight people.

However, I think most New Yorkers over a certain age (30) and under a certain age (75) are busy enough that keeping a calendar is essential; indeed, most people I know are booked up at least several weeks in advance. They are juggling social lives with work commitments and family commitments, so if you really want to see them, you usually have to make plans with them way beforehand.

But there can be good reasons for a last-minute invitation. It can mean you simply did not anticipate you were going to have this particular hour or two of leisure time. It can mean you just got tickets to something unexpectedly. It can mean that someone else cancelled you at the last minute.

Obviously, there is a difference between a last-minute invitation to a movie and one to the opera. If a friend is going to take me to the Met because someone just dropped 10th row center orchestra tickets into his lap, he can call me as late as he wants and I’ll be delighted. But it doesn’t really matter what the last-minute invite is for, as long as
it is not this friend’s standard MO and as long as it is proffered the right way.

Always preface the last-minute invite with: “I’m sorry, I know it’s last minute.” If you have an extra ticket to something, it is always gratis for the other person. If the person is not available, you must say something like, “Oh, I figured you might not be free at the
last minute. Let’s make another plan right now for when you are available.” This says
to the person, “I’m not just trying to fill my evening, I do really care about seeing you.” Once in a while, you’ll come across a person who feels entitled and expects everyone to be at their beck and call.

This person will call at the last minute to get together and, if you are not free,
is extremely annoyed. This attitude obviously adds injury to insult. There are also rare instances when someone may invite you at the last minute because they feel obligated for some reason; they want to get credit for inviting you but they don’t really want you to come and are actually hoping you won’t be free. (Beware the party invitation that arrives
the morning of the day of the party.) Of course, habitual last-minute social planning can be a corollary of intimacy.

With your best friends, there is never any problem with a spur-of-the-moment plan, because if you are NOT free at the last minute, it’s no big deal; you will see the
person again soon enough. I know I tend to be a “Martinet” about matters of social protocol; I do insist that we need to behave with as much courtesy to each other as we can. But when all is said and done, I would not want a life without the possibility of a last-minute invite. It’s nice to know that your day can change in the blink of an iPhone.

Jeanne Martinet, aka Miss Mingle, is
the author of seven books on social interaction.
Read her blog at MissMingle.com.

Christopher Moore is a writer living in Manhattan.

by Christopher Moore

I hate to write about it. I even hate to think about it. But the question comes to me, usually after the door shuts. I wait for the movement. I look up, seeking the little illuminated sign to tell me where I am and where I’m going. There’s a tiny, ugly pause.

After the little surge starts, I’m grateful, especially when I’ve quickly and unpleasantly confronted the question, if only in my own mind: What happens when my elevator luck runs out?

I ponder the matter anxiously when I’m alone in an elevator. Or when I’m reading a newspaper or watching a TV news report, like the ones last week about how the average number of elevator inspections done by the city’s Department of Buildings has decreased dramatically during the past four years. That particular tidbit came after the awful death last December in Midtown of Suzanne Hart, a 41-year-old who died while trying to board an elevator.

News is when the everyday turns horrific. I’ve spent enough time in a newsroom to know that much. What happened in the Hart case could have happened to any of us. Such accidents also hit home because elevators remain such a part of our urban culture and common experience.

Responding to last week’s report, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer issued one of his ever-present press releases. This one wasn’t bad. He recommended carving the Department of Buildings into two parts: the Department of Buildings, which would deal with development, and a new Office of Inspections to handle the inspections. Whether a bureaucratic shift is needed or not, it’s clear New Yorkers need their elevators to be tested and as secure as possible.

In my building, the elevators are a relatively social experience. In those confined spaces, I’ve had better, albeit brief, conversations with strangers than I used to have with some of my best friends in New Jersey. Maybe it’s knowing that the chat will be short. We get right to the point. When somebody asks how things are going, the answers tend to be shockingly and refreshingly real. We’ve talked about the weather in there, yes, but we’ve also covered the pain of unemployment, the challenges of teaching college students who went to bad high schools, presidential primaries and the ongoing balancing act of a decent romantic relationship.

Sometimes I wonder, does this happen in other buildings? Granted, even in our building, elevator passengers have an annoying habit of wanting to stop at other floors. Still, having those people around keeps me from worrying about when the good elevators
might go bad. My basic understanding of science is pathetic enough for me to consider
the elevator’s operation to be, basically, magic. So I go through much of my time on the elevator wondering exactly when things will go wrong.

Sure, I go through life that way, too. When it comes to the elevator, though, I tend not to tell anyone. The questions running through my mind seem so clearly nuts. Like…Should I have my cell phone with me every time I get on the elevator? If this thing stops, how long will it be before I get out of here? Should I have used the restroom before I got on? Would it be worse to be stuck here alone or with that crazy lady with the red hair I have never liked?

I’m crazy, but not alone. Last week, I read exactly what to do when an elevator is plummeting. The piece must have been in the Science Times section of the
New York Times, since it’s the answer to a question I never would have asked— Science Times specializes in such cases.

The bottom-line advice this time was: lie down, as flat as possible, with your back
on the floor. This strikes me as unrealistic. In a plummeting elevator, I’m going to be fairly busy screaming.
Christopher Moore is a writer living
in Manhattan. He’s available by email
at ccmnj@aol.com and is on Twitter (@cmoorenyc).

Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2004–05. © 2012 Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press.

Museum exhibitions curated by artists are always an interesting journey into the artist’s brain. Sometimes we find out things we really didn’t want to know, like a hidden passion for paintings of big-eyed children or a love of the color beige. Sometimes, however, we get to peer deeply into the artist’s mind and actually connect the dots of how what interests them relates to their work.

Printin’, a new show in the print galleries at MoMA, is such an exhibition. It is showing concurrently with the major but unwieldy exhibition Print/Out, and trust me, you can skip the big show in favor of this superbly well-chosen, flowing and evocative collection of work. In this case, smaller is better.

Printin’ is co-curated by Sarah Suzuki, an associate curator at the museum, and the artist Ellen Gallagher. The exhibition pivots around Gallagher’s seminal suite of prints entitled DeLuxe, 60 prints that combine just about every printing technique on earth along with collage, 3-D objects and hand-painting. It is a massive and stunning work and a benchmark in Gallagher’s artistic development.

Given some amount of free rein to wander through MoMA’s collections and make the visual and conceptual connections that most interested her, Gallagher has created a startlingly beautiful and profound exhibition. The heart of the curators’ magic is an ability to exhibit links between disparate works, either visual, thematic or temperamental. The connections that the curators make are delightful, allowing the viewer the joy of seeing and understanding those visual connections.

For example, one wall of the show is hung with an unusually sensitive, large Keith Haring woodcut. Next to that is a painted Kachina made by an anonymous Hopi Indian, then the wall bounces up into a very unusual Paul Klee piece of pigmented paste on paper and cloth. Below that is a wonderful abstract print by Canadian artist Akesuk Tudlik.

The visual themes dance across this wall in a giddy flash of discovery. You get it. You are able to see what Gallagher sees and presumably loves in these pieces. A 1921 photograph of the black vaudevillian Bert Williams dressed incongruously in both tuxedo and chicken suit hangs above a print by Otto Dix entitled “American Riding
Act,” which depicts horse-borne men in elaborate feathered headdresses shooting at something beyond the picture plane. The connections are both funny and chilling. As opposed to the conceptually dense and overly hip showcase exhibition Print/Out, Suzuki and Gallagher have mounted a show that is intellectually accessible, artistically illuminating and a sheer joy to visit.
Printin’
Through May 14, The Museum of Modern
Art, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400, www.
moma.org.
This article first appeared in the March
7 issue of CityArts. For more from New
York’s Review of Culture, visit www.cityartsnyc.com

Think of it this way: Democracy is hard to do. To achieve true democracy, you need to have an educated electorate. If citizens don’t know what their public officials are up to, they can’t make intelligent choices. In fact, they can be led around like donkeys. When that happens, public officials can put anything out there, take a bow and say, “We did it and you should thank us.”Take the case of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. After New York got the reputation of being dysfunctional, Cuomo came in and set things right—at least he said he did.

Among his other accomplishments, he got the state Legislature to establish a single ethics commission governing all public servants. Good stuff—really. Among other things agreed to in its establishment were that the Legislature would appoint many of the members and that the Senate Republicans, in or out of the majority, would get the lion’s share of the picks for commission, now and in the future. That would be like agreeing that if the Democrats win the next election, the Republicans will be allowed to pick the Supreme Court justices after each vacancy. No matter; Cuomo got the bragging rights for having done the impossible. The more he says it, the more people believe it. The more people believe it, the higher his popularity soars.

There is also the question of redistricting and the efforts to put an end to the insidious self-serving gerrymandering that allows legislative majorities to draw districts where they have the best chance of winning. Cuomo ran for office on that one—“I will veto that bill,” he intoned time and again. In fact, he said it so many times that I believed it. I admired him for it and said so, in my columns and on the radio.

The problem was that the redesigned Cuomo, now a sort of Blue Dog Democrat, appears to like the Republican conservative-moderates in the majority in the state Senate. If he stuck to his guns and vetoed the bill and everyone got a fair chance in Democratic New York, the Democrats would win big and have the kind of majority they enjoy in the state Assembly. Now, I admit that the Democrats don’t deserve any rave reviews for their past performance. Nevertheless, we are talking democracy here. If the game is rigged—and believe me, it is—you don’t have democracy.

Into all of this comes old New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has said all along that he supports Cuomo for his determination to veto the corrupt, morally repugnant, anti-democratic redistricting bill. Cuomo and Koch have had their problems in the past but they made up, I am sure, partly based on Cuomo’s assurance that he would veto the terrible gerrymander.

But, politics being what they are, Cuomo began to waver. He began to hint that in politics, you have to give something to get something. The question then is whether what you give is more than what you get. In this case, the agreement seemed to be that in 10 years (!), there would be a very bad constitutional amendment that would allow the legislative minorities to continue to do then what they are doing now. But if Cuomo gets an agreement, he will once again say that he has won.

So the technique is now established. Cuomo’s very high popularity numbers have begun to dip. Two groups are very angry. The New York teachers believe that they have been very badly treated by the governor, as do the labor unions representing the state’s public servants. His popularity drop has only been a few points—by itself, a five- or six-point drop in the polls is nothing. But if the numbers continue to drop, the Cuomo folks will take notice. If Cuomo is anything, it is tough.

If he has to make concessions, he will. But Team Cuomo doesn’t take nicely to those who oppose them. Like the Cuomo staffer said to gutsy Governor Dannel Malloy from Connecticut, “We operate on two speeds here: Get along and kill.”

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

“Only a nonpartisan solution accurately reflects the voting publc,” – Liz Krueger

by Liz Krueger

Liz Krueger, (D) Senator, NY

Two years ago, I committed to vote against any redistricting plan unless it was developed through a nonpartisan redistricting process. I stand by that commitment, and not just because our current process is flawed. Not surprisingly, both houses’ majority parties are pushing their own partisan plans, despite the fact that every Republican senator and a majority of Assembly members made the same pledge I made: to vote against partisan redistricting and support real reform. It is now up to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to veto the plan and allow a federal court to draw districts without the interference of self-interested legislators.
Some have argued that instead of sending the matter to the courts, Cuomo should allow a bad map this year in exchange for the promise of a better redistricting process in 2022. Unfortunately, this can’t work. Albany leaders have already welched on promises of reform—as the New York Times asked, “How can we trust this gang?”
Even if we could be guaranteed a better system a decade from now—which I believe is hardly certain—a decade is a long, long time to wait for reform. And make no mistake, the lines Albany’s partisan leaders have drawn are bad. They are designed for one purpose: benefiting the majority parties in each house at the expense of equal voting rights and rational representation for communities and neighborhoods.
The proposed state Senate lines are particularly egregious, but that’s to be expected; it is much harder to draw lines that protect Republican senators in New York because our state has been trending Democratic for years. To protect their vulnerable majority, the Senate Republicans’ proposal gives New York City one less district than the census figures warrant and adds an additional 63rd District upstate. They manage this—in spite of the fact that the state’s population has shifted downstate over the last 10 years—by once again putting many more people in New York City and Long Island districts than in upstate districts.
In addition, the plan once again creates Senate districts that systematically split the African-American and Latino communities on Long Island, despite dramatic growth in these communities over the last 10 years. Dividing, or “cracking,” these communities into multiple districts is a tactic clearly aimed at protecting the nine Republican incumbents who represent Long Island in the Senate.
The argument for accepting these maps is that we will fix the problem in the future. But the proposed constitutional amendment is simply too weak to work. The amendment would set up a commission appointed by politicians whose work could be edited or even rejected by the legislature. Even worse, the commission would be susceptible to deadlock and political pressure.
Furthermore, we would be accepting these bad lines on a promise, since the constitutional amendment would have to pass the legislature again next year before the voters could consider it. Since so many legislators have broken their promises on this subject already, I don’t understand why we are so sure they will keep their promise and vote for an amendment again next year, when the pressure is off.
Compare the Legislature’s political machinations, last-minute announcements and strategic heel-dragging to the work of magistrate judge Roanne Mann, the special master already overseeing our congressional redistricting after the Legislature failed to develop congressional lines in time to prepare for a June congressional primary. Judge Mann has announced clear deadlines, has openly named the experts she will be consulting and has articulated legitimate, explicit criteria for the maps she will produce. She has set a standard for what New Yorkers should expect in redistricting, a standard the Legislature has refused to meet.
Newsday’s editorial board stated it perfectly: “New York could still get fair political boundaries this year, but for it to happen, the special master, the judges and Cuomo are going to have to stand tall and make the difficult, proper decisions.”

Liz Krueger is a State senator who represents the Upper East Side.

Across Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently announced it is in the early design stages of a complete overhaul of its famous Fifth Avenue plaza.

One of the main features of the project is the design and installation of all new fountains, replacing the present fountains that have been in place since 1970.

Harold Holzer, senior vice president of external affairs, said another goal of the project is to improve access to the museum’s 81st Street and 83rd Street entrances.

“We have more than 5 million people visit a year and they all walk up the front steps,” Holzer said. “It’s difficult to direct people to 81st Street.”

“This exciting new outdoor environment will provide the perfect complement to the majestic spaces and exceptional collections found within the building,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the museum, in a statement.