"you can kind of see the smoke from the controlled detonation on Ellis island." (Photo: Twitter/m_crit)

If you've heard a series of loud explosions over the last hour, don't panic. Twitter users initially worried that the electric grid may have blown in lower Manhattan again, but the loud noises are actually due to a series of controlled detonations reportedly orchestrated by the FBI.

According to NBC News, the "FBI says they will help US Parks police safely explode damaged explosions after #Sandy 6X over next 30 minutes on Ellis Island." ABC and MSNBC's Contessa Brewer also reported the incident.

ABC News anchor Diana Williams tweeted that New Yorkers should expect six blasts. Judging from Twitter, the explosions were heard around the city, from Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope to Manhattan.

Ellis Island itself experienced extensive damage during the storm and is closed "for the foreseeable future."

The Observer has reached out to multiple sources for independent confirmation. A representative at the New Jersey Attorney General's Office told us the FBI issued a press release about the issue, so we left a message for them. The Mayor's office directed us to the National Parks Service, which directed us to the Department of Interior, where we left a message. We also contacted the NYPD, which promised to get back to us soon. Fun with government runarounds!

Update:

According to a press release published by the AP:

This hospital gives us the creeps, but apparently it's worth saving.

Plants and animals aren’t the only things that are endangered—buildings are, too! Or so says the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

And although the number of endangered historic buildings is nowhere close to the whopping 2,000 endangered plant and animal species, endangered anything is never a good thing, which is why the Trust releases a list of the top 11 endangered historic buildings each year.

Since the annual list was started 25 years ago, only seven New York sites and buildings have been classified as endangered—thanks to the city's Landmarks Law, in part—though that seventh was just added this year.They are: Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, the Hudson River Valley, John Coltrane’s Huntington ranch house, the Peach Bridge Neighborhood in Buffalo, certain turn-of-the-century buildings in Harlem, the Lower East Side, and this year’s addition, the Ellis Island Hospital Complex.

But this isn’t the first time that the Ellis Island Hospital Complex has made it on the list: in 1992, the complex and its surrounding buildings were crumbling and falling apart. The listing caught the attention of the National Park Service which then stepped in to stabilize the buildings. But now the complex faces another threat: lack of funding.

Today, the buildings, which have been off-limits to visitors since the 1950s, are unused, empty, and no doubt teeming with the ghosts of former quarantine patients. And while the Observer certainly has no interest in visiting these creepy digs—described on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s website as having a “haunting beauty”—some people are.  “Preservation experts and historians feel strongly that they must be protected and opened to the public,” the website says.  

So what needs to happen this time to get these historical buildings off the endangered list? Funding.

The goal, the website says, is to rehabilitate and refurbish the buildings so that they can be opened for public visitation. And by “refurbish,” we hope they mean Ouija Boards are provided.

http://observer.com/2012/06/the-war-on-landmarks-moves-to-defcon-2-big-real-estate-forming-big-coalition-to-challenge-preservation/

"Yep," was all I could manage in response.

Greg and I just signed our contract today on our new apartment in Park Slope.

HOLY
FREAKIN
WHOA

In a matter of three weeks, we found a place, made an offer, had our offer accepted and now we are sort of like official homeowners. Well almost...there is still the matter of getting our mortgage sorted, inspections, renting out our current apartment (750 sft, 26th floor, doorman building, sick view of Ellis Island and the bridge, anyone???), closing and the like, but we're on our way at least.

Is it possible that this has now officially eclipsed the wedding in the realm of serious life moves? Am I really going to have a husband AND a mortgage!? I've said it before and I'll say it again: WHOA.

Consider, as an egregious example, an essay called "Ellis Island Art," written in the 1920's by the then influential art critic of The New York Herald-Tribune , Royal Cortissoz. The Herald-Tribune was, until its demise in 1966, one of the most respected papers in the country, and it was in most instances anything but reactionary in its arts coverage. Virgil Thomson, himself a modernist composer who collaborated with Gertrude Stein on several operas, was the paper's music critic. Cortissoz, however, was something else entirely. This is the key passage in "Ellis Island Art":

"The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way …. Such movements!-crude, crotchety, tasteless, abounding in arrogant assertion, making a fetich [ sic ] of ugliness and, above all else, rife in ignorance of the technical amenities. These movements have been promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers in aesthetic naturalization-the makers of true Ellis Island art."

Well, art criticism seldom gets more reactionary (or vicious) than that. No respectable newspaper would publish such a piece today. And the intensity of this polemic is all the more appalling when we come to realize that it was directed against the "alien" influence of such modern masters as Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Braque, Klee and their modernist colleagues in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. And Cortissoz wasn't alone in his view of modernism. In the 1930's, the American regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton, then at the height of his popularity, led an intensely chauvinistic campaign to discredit the influence of European modernism on American art. "In spite of all the cultivated whoopings to the contrary," he declared, "art cannot be imported."

I have lately been reminded of all this reactionary rejection of modernism by a splendid exhibition called Monet to Matisse, Homer to Hartley: American Masters and Their European Muses , at the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, which brilliantly traces the influence of European modernism on American art in purely artistic terms. Indeed, I doubt if this sometimes touchy and divisive subject has ever before been as scrupulously explored as it is now in this exhibition. From both the European and American perspectives, this show and its catalog are exemplary in every respect.

The selection of paintings could hardly be improved, either in aesthetic quality or historical scope; and the written commentaries are similarly marked by a high level of connoisseurship that is mercifully devoid of the kind of clotted prose so often encountered in art writing today. Indeed, from the very first room in the show, where we see the bold juxtaposition of Frédéric Bazille's painting of male swimmers in Summer Scene (1869) and Thomas Eakins' even more provocative Swimming (1885), the visitor to this exhibition is put on notice that this show will not be limited to a mere roundup of familiar pictures. And the boldness of this unexpected comparison of two masterpieces on similarly suggestive subjects is underscored by the sheer volume of new information in Richard R. Brettell's first-rate essay on "Eakins and the Male Nude in French Art, 1850-1890," in the catalog.

The curator of this remarkable exhibition, Carrie Haslett Bodzioney, has brought an unfailing eye, too, to the many other pairings that are the distinctive feature of American Masters and Their European Muses -among them ocean-surf paintings by Gustave Courbet and Winslow Homer, Cubist landscapes by Georges Braque and Max Weber, portraits by Renoir and George Bellows, and the surrealist- cum -abstract-expressionist paintings of André Masson (featured in the catalog) and Jackson Pollock. In fact, the modernist section of the show, with its comparisons of Francis Picabia and Joseph Stella, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley almost everywhere, closes the exhibition on the same high note that thrills us in that first encounter with Bazille and Eakins.

The pictorial narrative that unfolds for us in Monet to Matisse, Homer to Hartley: American Masters and Their European Muses -a narrative of American modernism and its European roots-is one of the greatest stories of the modern era in the Western world, and it is a story beautifully told in this show, which remains on view at the Portland Museum of Art through Oct. 17, 2004.

Much-Needed Recharging Battery Park, the largest open public space in downtown Manhattan and one of the city's most historic areas, is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. The park's 200-year-old Castle Clinton, built before the War of 1812, is scheduled for a long-overdue face-lift that will restore it to the grand outdoor performance space it was in the early 19th century. The restoration project also includes invigorating the bosque (the large wooded area traversed by paths east of the castle) and, starting this spring, commemorating the victims of the World Trade Center attack with a new constellation of gardens along the harbor.

"It's a great design," said Anthony Notaro, chair of Community Board 1's Battery Park City committee, who described the bosque plan to the full board at its public meeting on April 15. The board wholeheartedly endorsed the plan, conceived under the auspices of the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit corporation that works with city, state and national parks agencies to develop the 23-acre site, which is jointly maintained by the city's Department of Parks and Recreation and the National Park Service.

Long in a state of benign neglect, Battery Park began its ongoing transformation with the conservancy's creation in 1994. Previously a tangled web of decaying paths and scrubby wildlife, where illegal vendors hawked their wares to nervous tourists scurrying through the park on the way to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, over the last decade the Battery has become a vibrant, well-kept green space and a destination in its own right.

The esteemed Dutch horticulturist Piet Oudolf, a recent recipient of the Best Garden Award at the Chelsea Flower Show, will design both the tribute gardens and the bosque gardens, as well as new plantings beside the bikeway that will run along the park's interior perimeter. Mr. Oudolf's so-called New Wave style emphasizes sustainability and renewal to produce a garden that engages throughout the year. The Battery Park gardens, which will comprise native plants and have a more wild than manicured look, will be Mr. Oudolf's first public project in the United States.

"He was chosen because he is a real artist of nature," Warrie Price, president of the Battery Conservancy, told The Observer .

In addition to two food kiosks, new seating and extensive lighting to encourage nighttime visitation, the 30,000-square-foot bosque will feature an interactive fountain and a carousel. The fountain will be flush with the ground, so that children-and carefree adults-can run through its waters. The carousel will depart from the usual equestrian theme; instead of sitting on horses, riders will cling to the backs of such maritime fauna as turtles, sturgeons and seahorses. The marine motif suits the waterfront park and also recalls the New York Aquarium, which was housed next-door in Castle Clinton Garden from 1896 to 1941.

Pending only the approval of the city's Art Commission, the Battery Conservancy will soon begin raising the estimated $8 million required for the entire bosque project, which it hopes to complete by the summer of 2004. The conservancy will solicit contributions from private foundations and philanthropists, as well as from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Strapped as it is for cash, the city is not expected to provide any funding.

The renovation of the Castle Clinton National Monument, the linchpin of Battery Park's redevelopment, will cost an estimated $56 million; over $8 million in public funding has been secured so far. The rest of the money, which the Conservancy hopes to raise by next year, will likely come from private donors and foundations. The architectural teams of Thomas Pfifer & Partners and Beyer Blinder Bell are already sketching designs for the new facility, which will take an estimated two years to construct. The Castle Clinton renovation plan transforms the fort from a small ticketing station for the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island ferry to a full-blown harbor transportation hub. A revamped interpretive display will illuminate the building's history, explaining its genesis as a defensive fort against the British, its next incarnation as the largest entertainment center in the new republic, and its illustrious role as New York's first official immigration center, which welcomed over eight million new arrivals before Ellis Island opened and the center became the New York Aquarium. An open-air performing-arts venue will grace the top of the revamped structure, recalling the grand open theater of the 1820's and 30's.

On May 8, the conservancy will break ground on the tribute waterfront gardens, officially inaugurating what Ms. Price calls the Battery's "horticultural era." Given the nearby redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, she added, "There's more responsibility for our work, because all the world comes here."

At the same time, with its new promenades and plantings, enhanced security, and coming bike paths and performance space, the park is growing more attractive to the people who live and work in lower Manhattan, board member Judy Duffy told The Observer . Apart from being a tourist destination, she said, the Battery is also becoming an integral part of the downtown community: "It's becoming more and more of a neighborhood park."

-Megan Costello

April 23: Board 2, St. Vincent's Hospital, 170 West 12th Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-979-2272.

April 24: Board 8, P.S./I.S. 217, 645 Main Street, Roosevelt Island, auditorium, 7 p.m., 212-758-4340.

April 29: Board 3, P.S. 20, 166 Essex Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-533-5300.