The Portal, a large, round art installation designed to livestream video between the Flatiron district in Manhattan and a similar sculpture in the center of Dublin, would “redefine the boundaries of artistic expression and connectivity,” its promoters said when they unveiled it last week.
How it redefined those boundaries became a problem after videos on social media showed an OnlyFans model lifting her shirt in New York and people in Dublin displaying swastikas and images of the World Trade Center burning on Sept. 11, 2001.
The video feed between the two cities was shut down on Tuesday — temporarily, officials in New York and Dublin said. How soon the link might go on again remained an open question on Wednesday.
“We’re hoping to be up, hopefully, for the weekend,” said James Mettham, the president of the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, the nonprofit business group that coordinated the installation of the Portal in New York.
Michael Ryan, a spokesman for the Dublin City Council, which had handled arrangements there, said officials had hoped to hit the “on” button by now. But he said in a statement the “preferred solution,” which would have involved blurring the video, was not satisfactory.
He said that Portals.org, which created the sculpture, was looking into other “possible technical solutions” so the video feed could resume. Nicolas Klaus of Portals.org said by email that “our small team is looking at ideas to mitigate certain behavior.”
He also said that “we’re not aware of negative incidents” involving portals set up earlier to link Vilnius, Lithuania, and Lublin, Poland.
“The portals in New York City and Dublin are even more popular,” he said, “and we believe the reason is that everyone has an opinion about them” and is “trying to jump on the story to gain attention,” he said.
By Wednesday the installation had become tabloid fodder, after videos circulated online and one report quoted the OnlyFans model as saying that she had received “thousands of death threats” after the portals were shut down.
Mettham said that “there had always been a concern that someone, because it was a direct live feed, could display something.”
“I think we were worried about hate speech,” he said.
But he said that the Portal had been “intended to be a community piece” that “would be self-monitored,” meaning that people in the crowd would stop someone who started to do something inappropriate. “If it became out of control,” he added, “we would cut the feed.” Anyone in front of the Portal was seen but not heard: The feed did not carry audio.
He said the Flatiron NoMad group had put “protocols in place” to keep people from climbing on the Portal. Even so, Mettham said, people had tried. His group had put up barricades “to make it very clear that you don’t need to be on the Portal to enjoy it.”
“It’s not a playground,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be climbing on the Portal. You’re supposed to be interacting from a decent distance away.” He added, “The same goes for Dublin.”
Mettham said that the idea for the installation had originated in 2021 with Simons Foundation, a nonprofit group set up by Jim Simons, the mathematician-turned-financier, and his wife, Marilyn Simons. (Jim Simons, whom Forbes ranked 49th among the world’s billionaires in 2023, with $28.1 billion, died last week.)
Foundation officials saw the Portal in Lithuania, Mettham recalled. “They said, ‘We’d be interested in finding a way to do this in New York City,’” he said. “We introduced ourselves to Portals.com and said, ‘Who can we connect to?’”
The foundation eventually paid “a few hundred thousand dollars” — less than $500,000, he said — to have the Portal in New York fabricated, after Dublin had emerged as a city that was interested. When the livestream between New York and Dublin was turned on last week, Daithí de Róiste, Dublin’s lord mayor, said it would make Dublin “more inclusive” by making it possible for people “to meet and connect outside of their social circles and cultures.”
The plan was for the livestream to remain on until the fall, “creating an unprecedented, real-time visual bridge” between the two cities, the Flatiron NoMad group said at the time. Now, Mettham said on Wednesday, “my job here, as my wife said, is ‘You have to act like the principal now.’ Everyone loves it, but obviously it’s been taken advantage of.”
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Eric Adams on why he called migrants ‘excellent swimmers.’
On Tuesday, at his weekly news conference, Mayor Eric Adams was asked about the lifeguard shortage in New York City. In his answer, he made a point about migrant workers — who, he said, cannot be hired for jobs that urgently need to be filled.
“How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers,” he said, “and at the same time, we need lifeguards. And the only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right work to become a lifeguard.”
The comment drew criticism from all sides. Immigrant rights groups assailed it as “racist and divisive.” Conservative leaders said it was an effort to legitimize the hiring of noncitizens.
My colleagues Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays write that Adams saw things differently. He said on Wednesday that he had based the comment on conversations with migrants. He said he had gone to migrant centers around the city and asked people if they knew how to swim. He was “blown away” by the number of hands that went up.
“We have these capable people who know how to swim — from West Africa, from Ecuador, from South and Central America, from Mexico — and we have a shortage of lifeguards,” Adams said in response to a question from a reporter from the news outlet The City as he walked into City Hall on Wednesday. “If we start planning out now, we could be prepared next year.”
He had mentioned hiring migrants as lifeguards before, including once in February when he was asked about using police drones to help people who are drowning.
Dear Diary:
It was an unseasonably warm winter evening, the first night of the Year of the Dragon, and I was down near the Hudson River. I had just learned that a recorded family tree might exist on my family’s long-lost Chinese side.
I sat down with my dog to consider the news, watching broken branches float downstream. She sniffed at a saline-soaked rope tied to what appeared to be an oyster cage. Overhead, the West Side Highway hummed.
A flock of sea gulls scattered, then landed, their talons gripping abandoned wooden posts jutting out above the river’s surface near the remnants of the 69th Street Transfer Bridge.
I saw a man who was facing northwest. He was full of energy: laughing, jumping, waving his arms. I could tell he was on a FaceTime with a child who at that moment must have been right across the river in New Jersey.
