Across the River and Through the ‘Hoods

It has always been here, east of Manhattan, a sprawl of middle-class sameness with aluminum-sided houses and ethnic diners.

But does anyone bother to visit?

Now the Picassos and Klees and Pollocks are relocating to Queens, and in an area that is so indifferent to trendy taste there is not even a Starbucks. Yet.

There was a fair amount of nervous tittering this week as the elite art world journeyed to the borough to inspect the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary quarters in Long Island City.

MoMA in midtown Manahattan is closing for three years for a serious face-lift, and the museum has trucked highlights of its immensely valuable collection of modern and contemporary art--even Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”--to a gussied-up warehouse in a borough whose most identifable landmarks are La Guardia and JFK airports and Shea Stadium.

Groups of artists, critics, members and donors were gingerly ushered to the new site in anticipation of a grand opening for the public this weekend. Free shuttle buses were provided for the short ride over the bridge. The No. 7 subway station, near the new location, was repainted white. Even a particular New York newspaper cleared the way for the other half of the museum-going experience--lunch.

“East of Midtown, It’s the Art of the Meal” read the cover of its dining section, offering a list of “remarkably toothsome dining options,” many of them inexpensive, Asian or Turkish, and family-run. (Interestingly, Zagat 2002 lists 135 restaurants in the West 50s near MoMA and only eight in Long Island City.)

During a tour Wednesday afternoon, Ronald Lauder, chairman of MoMA’s board of trustees, was eyeing the rehung works from the permanent collection when he was asked to recall the last time he came to Queens.

He thought a moment. Recently, he said, on the way “to Long Island.” Grinning, the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry asked: “Yes, Ron, but when was the last time you stopped in Queens?” The cosmetics magnate, who admitted his mother, Estee Lauder, was born in Corona, just smiled: “I cash checks all the time down the street,” he said, referring to a bodega on Queens Boulevard, the main drag.

The museum’s managers clearly understand the psychic leap Manhattanites, in particular, must make to cross the East River.

Thus they have mounted one of the most ambitious (and not inexpensive) publicity campaigns around the move that anyone in the art world can remember, even commissioning a book by artist William Wegman in which one of his chic dogs, wearing a polka-dot shirt and dark suit, takes a two-stop subway ride from midtown to MoMA QNS, as the location here has been graphically anointed.

The dog is photographed peering out a moving No. 7 train: “What a view! This is a real adventure,” he thinks to himself. “... Am I in Long Island City? Am I lost? Wait, no, it’s a part of Queens too. Brooklyn must be over there.”

Clearly, all the hype and hand-holding is intended to ensure that attendance--1.5 million visitors last year--does not drop off too dramatically. But museum officials anticipate that daily attendance will go from 5,000 to less than 2,000. The two other best-known cultural sites in Queens, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (a MoMA satellite) and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, have struggled with attendance.

“As someone born and brought up here, I can tell you there’s no one more provincial than a native New Yorker,” said Jennifer Russell, MoMA’s deputy director for exhibitions and collections. It’s not so much that people are hostile toward Queens, she explained. They just don’t consider it.

To art addicts who have slowly grown comfortable with a borough like Brooklyn, with its leading museums, artistic lineage and hip nightlife, Queens has little over-the-bridge charm. It is profoundly residential and mostly middle class, existing for itself, the biggest borough with the blandest identity.

But when real estate becomes too valuable elsewhere, the next stop is often Queens. And so Joel Shapiro, the sculptor and a Queens native, is moving his studio from Bleecker Street in NoHo to a factory in Long Island City “with a tremendous space, beautiful light and an atmosphere of possibility that doesn’t feel closed down the way that Manhattan does.”

But would he live in Queens again, abandoning his townhouse on the Upper East Side and access to $18-a-plate pasta?

“Never,” said the Bayside High School graduate. “Queens was the place I escaped from.”

In fact, historically, although artists may have spent their childhoods here, almost none except Joseph Cornell, who lived on the wishfully named Utopia Parkway, worked in Queens. One of the only references in literature to Queens occurs when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby drives past the Corona dumps, describing them as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke.”

He was talking about more than 1,000 acres of ashes that later became Flushing Meadow Park, now the site of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

Paul Shanley, former publisher of Art in America and a Queens resident most of his adult life, predicts that at the end of MoMA’s three-year experiment in international living, neither Queens nor the museum will be much changed.

“It will be the hip thing to do for a while to go to Long Island City to see the Picasso exhibit and find a new little Italian restaurant,” Shanley said. “But I don’t think the experience will penetrate this elite institution, and I don’t see people from the neighborhoods coming much to the museum. It’s too intimidating.”

Perhaps the idea that MoMA will reinvent Queens may seem patronizing to 2.2 million residents, almost half born outside this country, many scraping to get by and steeped in their own rich culture here in “the middle landscape.”

That is how L.A. architect Michael Maltzan, who designed MoMA QNS, referred to Queens, “a space of always becoming, not fully formed.” He spent his early years in tonier Roslyn Heights, farther out on Long Island.