“Inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal—New York City’s ‘most hated building,’ according to the website Failed Architecture,” is a new baby grand piano, writes James Barron in Wednesday’s (10/19) New York Times. The piano, which arrived on October 7 and was donated by the nonprofit group Sing for Hope, “was the idea of Adrian Untermyer … deputy director of the Historic Districts Council, a preservation group. … ‘It’s like an arts intervention,’ said Camille Zamora, a co-founder and an executive director of Sing for Hope. ‘We bring the arts to places that don’t usually have them and could most use them.’… Mr. Untermyer … had noticed that there were pianos in train stations in Paris … Once he returned to New York, he noticed that … in the bus terminal … a command post known as the operations control center had been moved and banks of monitors connected to surveillance cameras were gone, leaving a carpeted, stagelike space.… The former operations center ‘was a space that was vacant, a spot that 225,000 people pass every day,’ Mr. Untermyer said. ‘I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to put a piano there?’ ”
Posted October 24, 2016
