Red Grooms first conceived the idea of creating his 6,400 square foot, 3-D, mixed-media portrait of the city about five years ago, shortly after he did a similar but much smaller mock-up of Chicago. "I've always been in love with urban places," explains Grooms, who was born in Nashville but has spent most of his adult life in New York's artist milieu. "I'm not a country kid." His chance to capture Manhattan began in April 1975. Two companies, the Orient Overseas Associates and Creative Time, Inc. found him enough space in the glass-walled, ground floor of a new Wall St. area skyscraper for his comic panorama. Since then Grooms, 38, along with his artist wife, Mimi Gross, 35, and the rest of the 22-member group they call the Ruckus Construction Company, have been building their higgledy-piggledy metropolis. It features a 30-foot-high version of the World Trade Center with a working elevator, a Broadway ticker-tape parade, the Woolworth Building with all its gothic gingerbread and the Statue of Liberty—in red platform shoes and holding aloft a cigarette.
"Ruckus," explains Grooms in a still obvious drawl, "is a southern term meaning commotion"—and that's what the project is meant to cause. "It's a mix," he says, pointing to the complex of walk-in buildings, pop-up cartoon figures, landmarks and what-have-you, which visitors can stroll through, under and over. "Tiny figures are interspersed with life-sized ones," Red goes on to explain, "the way the eyes see things. It's all very theatrical, like puppet shows, waxworks, dioramas. I hope it has a magical quality."
For authenticity, Grooms sent his staff into lower Manhattan to photograph, sketch and research the details of buildings before they picked up a hammer. Actual residents and workers in the area—newsstand dealers, sidewalk superintendents, hoboes, secretaries—are represented in the cutout and papier-mâché figures. Realistic touches are everywhere—steam puffs out of manholes; postmen carry envelopes addressed to real people; and portraits of Governor Hugh Carey and Mayor Abe Beame are found in the vicinity of City Hall, along with Henry Hudson and dozens of other men and women from history.
The Groomses, who live in New York's nearby Little Italy area with their 5-year-old daughter, Saskia, fear that their work will not be taken seriously. Although the art reviewers have not yet been heard from, New York Times' architectural critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote, "It is New York circa 1975. And it is nonpareil architectural criticism." Now that Lower Manhattan is completed, Grooms plans to move to Times Square and start replicating Midtown. Then the entire project will be reassembled as a major exhibition in New York's Marlborough art gallery in May. "This poor city is disappearing so fast," Mimi notes. "Its humanity has to be captured—and revived."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
