SINCE I have never been to Dublin, Ireland, and have only seen it by surfing on Google Street View, I thought I would head over to Madison Square in June 2024 for a look at what was called the New York City Portal, a direct video connection to a receiver in Dublin’s O’Connell Street arranged by the Flatiron NoMad Partnership on Broadway and 23rd Street beside the scaffolded Flatiron Building. As luck would have it, though, by then it was closing at 3 PM our time (8 PM in Dublin) because of inappropriate behavior, such as strippers (fine by me) and people holding up swastikas and images from 9/11 (not cool). People are people! It closed for good in September.
When Portal was shut down for about a week — Mettham drops the article in front of Portal, like Burning Man or Fight Club — it was broadly taken as evidence that New York can’t have nice things. No wonder something that worked between cities in Lithuania and Poland (Benediktas Gylys, the artist behind the project, is Lithuanian) couldn’t work for us. But then Portal reopened on May 19 with limited hours. And this time it had a new mechanism that blurred the screen if anyone got too close to it as well as an on-site Portal “ambassador.” The installation successfully ran until September. This era of Portal is what Mettham hopes will be remembered. “There were so many beautiful moments — engagements, family members reconnecting,” he says. “I think New York should have nice things. We deserve that.” [Curbed-NY Magazine]
Many may not remember it but a similar device was set up by the Fulton Ferry on Old Fulton Street in the spring of 2008; I don’t remember what city it was hooked up to. I did a Forgotten NY tour in which we walked across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, then across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, after which I met a couple of cousins at the now-closed Patriot and got sloshed before we took a train to New Hyde Park for another cousin’s barbecue. Those were the days.
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12/5/24