Olafur Eliasson. The New York City Waterfalls.

Four waterfalls on the East River

From 26 June to 13 October 2008, New Yorkers saw four waterfalls where there had never been any. They poured into the East River, the water between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The first stood at the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. The second sat between Piers 4 and 5 in Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The third was at Pier 35 in Lower Manhattan, north of the Manhattan Bridge. The fourth was on the north shore of Governors Island.

Each rose some 90 to 120 feet, about 27 to 37 metres, according to Public Art Fund, which commissioned the work and presented it with the City of New York. From the riverbank, a bridge or a ferry, at least one of them was always in view.

The work was by Olafur Eliasson, the Danish Icelandic artist based in Berlin. He had made waterfall works before, but none set in the middle of a city like this.

Scaffolding, pumps, river water

Up close, the waterfalls did not hide how they were made. Their skeleton was building scaffolding, the kind that wraps New York buildings under repair. Pumps lifted water from the East River itself to the top, then let it fall back into the river.

No water was brought in. No reservoir. The river was both source and destination.

Beneath each fall hung intake pools that filtered the water so fish and other river life were not drawn up. The pumps ran on renewable power. When the show ended, the scaffolding was taken down and reused on other projects.

Nearly 200 designers, engineers and builders, working with Tishman Construction, put the four falls up. After sunset, LED lights lit the structures. In high winds, storms or power shortages, the water was shut off.

Looking at a river again

Public Art Fund says Eliasson wanted New Yorkers to reconsider their relationship with their surroundings, and at the same time to feel that they shared them.

A waterfall does this in a very simple way: it gives the eye something to measure with. Water falling thirty odd metres takes time to reach the surface. Watching it, people judge the height, then compare it with the bridge, the buildings, the far bank. The scale of the city appears through a column of water.

And because there were four falls in four places, viewers had to move. Walk the waterfront, take a ferry, stand on a bridge. The work did not fit into one view. It spread along the river.

The approach is close to the artificial sun Eliasson hung in the Turbine Hall in 2003. There too the mechanism was not hidden. Visitors knew it was lamps, mirrors, mist. They knew, and still they stopped.

A work that knew it would come down

The New York City Waterfalls lasted a little over three months. It was made of temporary things: hired scaffolding, pumps, electricity. From the start it was planned to be dismantled.

What stays is not the engineering, considerable as it was. It is that the work added nothing new to the city. The water was river water. The frame was a building frame. The only thing added was attention.

After October 2008 the East River went back to what it had been. But for those who had stood watching a column of water fall beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the river was perhaps no longer quite invisible.