From the Roof: Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates in Central Park

The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers visitors an array of viewing opportunities—highlighted by the special off-season opening of its Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden (weather permitting)—as well as other events to provide exceptional access to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's public work of art The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979–2005, installed in Central Park February 12–27, 2005 (weather permitting).

The Metropolitan's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, which offers spectacular views across Central Park to the Manhattan skyline, is open for an unprecedented sixteen winter days (weather permitting) during the period that The Gates is installed. Normally, the Cantor Roof Garden is closed to the public from November through late April.

From the vantage point of the Roof Garden, visitors can enjoy a dramatic bird's-eye view of this extraordinary work of art and cultural phenomenon, which has been twenty-six years in the development and approval phases. The monumental undertaking—the husband-and-wife artist team's first temporary outdoor work of art in New York, their home of over forty years—consists of 7,500 saffron-colored vinyl gates (each sixteen feet in height and hung with saffron fabric panels) placed at twelve-foot intervals over twenty-three miles of pedestrian walkways that lace the park.