Everyone in Tribeca seems to have an opinion about “the bean.” Not the sparkling tourist favorite in the middle of Chicago’s Millennium Park but a smaller one by the same sculptor, Anish Kapoor, that currently sits at the base of a Herzog & de Meuron–designed luxury tower in the wealthy Manhattan neighborhood.
Residents of 56 Leonard Street and local business owners claim they love how the Tribeca bean turns an otherwise nondescript intersection into a destination and a spectacle. Art critics and historic-preservation advocates say that’s exactly what’s wrong with it.
It’s now been two years since the unveiling of the British-Indian sculptor’s Tribeca bean, a mirrored, compressed sphere that some say looks more like a giant blob of mercury getting squashed under the building’s mass. Unlike Kapoor’s enormous Cloud Gate, as the Chicago bean is officially called, the untitled Tribeca sculpture measures just 48 feet by 19 feet and is tightly wedged at the bottom of the 821-foot-tall tower—often referred to as the “Jenga Building”—where apartment prices range from $3 million for a one-bedroom to $50 million for a penthouse. Kapoor himself bought a four-bedroom condominium there in 2016 for $13.5 million, 47 stories up from the site of his creation.
The sculpture’s construction, which was first announced in 2008, didn’t go smoothly—workers got stuck overseas due to coronavirus restrictions, leaving the work half finished for nearly a year. Once it was complete, people flocked to it for selfies, even as some TikTokers weren’t so kind. (Comments on a video about the Tribeca bean included “Change it rn,” “Chicago dupe,” and “Immediately, no.”)
While Cloud Gate gets about 20 million visitors a year, on a recent weekday morning, not a single one of the dozen or so people who passed the Tribeca sculpture over a 10-minute period glanced at it. On another recent visit, a weekend afternoon, a couple of pedestrians who looked like tourists glimpsed at it but didn’t break stride. Two more stood for several minutes with their backs to it, staring down at their phones. Its 38 stainless-steel panels shined from afar, but up close they revealed streaks, smudges, and handprints and reflected nearby construction sites and bags of recycling waiting for pickup.
Upon the sculpture’s unveiling, Alex Greenberger, of ARTnews, called the Tribeca bean an “eyesore that no one asked for” and “the tacky fast-fashion cousin of its couture Chicago counterpart.” Greenberger’s mind hasn’t changed. “I just don’t think that this is a very aesthetically interesting or pleasing work,” he says. And he takes issue with the sculpture as public art, given its connection to the luxury tower. “It’s this highly moneyed enterprise that put this thing on,” he says. “That kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”
Others, including from the neighborhood’s many art galleries, see it differently. “I happen to think it’s a successful piece,” Nancy Pantirer, an artist and the founder of 81 Leonard Gallery, says. “It brings a lot of traffic to the neighborhood, which we all benefit from.” Yet the artist Hannah Eve Rothbard, a director at the same gallery, says, “It’s visually a cool concept and obviously public, but it still has this relationship with a private building housing the ultra-wealthy…. It’s shiny and new, but is it really New York? Is it really for New Yorkers?”
That debate has divided Tribeca denizens. Lynn Ellsworth, the founder of Tribeca Trust, a neighborhood organization that opposed 56 Leonard’s development, says, “Instead of a historic district to appreciate, we have a tourist attraction…. It’s a selfie backdrop.” Meanwhile, marketing-and-communications pro Alison Brod, who lives in 56 Leonard, says the sculpture is part of what attracted her to the property. “I’m proud to have something that is interesting,” she says. “It’s not a glitzy neighborhood. It’s a lot of old brick buildings, and it’s actually very quiet…. The energy and the reflection [of the bean] gives it a vibe.”
Another devotee is architect Lee F. Mindel, a fellow 56 Leonard resident and owner of Galerie56. Mindel, whose firm, SheltonMindel, designed the off-site 56 Leonard sales office, says it’s wrong to claim the sculpture doesn’t reflect the neighborhood when it literally reflects its surroundings. “A lot of these buildings, when they hit the ground, you might get a nail salon or … a liquor store,” he says. “Whether it’s controversial or not, it has people thinking and talking.”
The developers of 56 Leonard, which was fully sold and currently has 10 units going for resale, are pleased with the sculpture. As Alexico Group president Izak Senbahar said in a statement to Air Mail, “I believe the intention to seamlessly integrate the artwork and structure was brilliantly achieved.” (Representatives for Kapoor and Herzog & de Meuron declined interview requests.)
Lilly Tuttle, a Museum of the City of New York curator and public-art expert, is more skeptical. She says such pieces should feel like organic parts of the city and not a hand-me-down from elsewhere. “There are ways in which this bean was maybe not the optimal thing for this building to do,” she says. “It feels like a mini version of something that happened in another city.”
But Tuttle added that maybe the bean ought to cook longer. “Two years isn’t actually that long,” she says. “Sometimes there can be pieces that folks recoil at, at the beginning, and then the world can soften around them.”
Max Kutner is a New York–based journalist
