Welcome to today’s edition of Navigator, CityLab’s Saturday newsletter. 

The French daily Le Figaro didn’t care for “
L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped,” the final project by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude for Paris. Benjamin Olivennes’s column describes their latest installation as “very dated,” a trick the artists have “repeated ad nauseam for more than thirty-five years.” Christine Kelly, the prime-time host of Face à l’Info, didn’t think much of it either, tweeting that seeing the installation made her feel “ashamed.”

Fortunately for the frazzled media elites, France’s long national nightmare is almost over. The temporary transformation of one of Europe’s great memorials winds down on Oct. 3, just 16 days after the installation opened to the public. Over the last fortnight, the piece has drawn thousands of Parisians and tourists. But almost as soon as it began, it will all be complete.

All the late artists’ projects happened this way, with a high-profile kerfuffle followed by a short-lived resolution. The extreme brevity of works like “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” is a way for the artists to have the last word. The more hysterical their critics appear to be, the sillier they seem, in hindsight, after everybody has a good time for a few weeks and then just like that, it’s finished — nobody worse for wear. 

Parisians have indeed had a good time — gawking and ‘gramming, posing for selfies, and simply looking, deeply looking, at a monument that for all its marble majesty is easy to overlook when it’s normally bare. Drivers honked their horns at night as they passed the gift-wrapped arch. Kids skateboarded through the Place Charles de Gaulle with the fabric as a backdrop. Pedestrians
reclaimed the Champs-Élysées from drivers for a day. Tourists like me sipped spritzes at cafes in sight of the silvery spectacle, watching and reflecting.

Unfortunately for those of us who loved to see this memorial transformed, “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” marks the end for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installations for Paris. (Only one outstanding proposal remains worldwide: “The Mastaba,” a ziggurat comprising 410,000 oil barrels planned for Abu Dhabi.) After a career spanning decades and continents, little but memories remain to commemorate the artists’ monumental efforts.

For a mere two-week payoff, wrapping the Arc de Triomphe was a huge task. It’s worth considering it through the lens of the sheer effort this it took to pull off:

• 16 days: the run of “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped”
• $16 million: cost 
• 1,200: workers who wrapped the arch
• 162 feet: height of the monument
• 270,000 square feet: fabric used to wrap the arch
• 1.9 miles: red rope used to wrap the monument

As for the rest of their works, here’s a taste of some of the more awesome numbers:

• 7,503: gates erected in Central Park for “The Gates”
• 6 miles: proposed length of canopy to be draped over Arkansas River for “Over the River”
• 1,686: pages in the Environmental Impact Statement drafted for “Over the River”
• 24 years: time it took to get permission for “Wrapped Reichstag”
• 6.5 million square feet: fabric used to wrap 11 islands near Miami for “Surrounded Islands”

Often executed in the neon colors of a public works department, these installations looked like works in progress, as if they were markers for ongoing improvements. Such fleeting displays were never the nut of the idea that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were pursuing. It was progress for progress’s sake.

-Kriston Capps

• Take a moment to appreciate all the people who gave us the many Covid-19 dashboards that helped us better understand the pandemic. Between incomplete data and technology restraints, it isn’t easy to develop one.

• Hundreds of water fountains built by the Ottomans in Istanbul have run dry and are in disrepair. Now the city wants to restore some of them as part of a global push for free drinking water.

• In Berlin, “Arab Street” — where Syrian refugees have recreated the feel of their neighborhoods back home — is one of the most visible symbols of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s legacy and the ongoing challenges of integrating a new community.  

• Dingbat isn’t just the name of a font. From Laura Bliss, a look at the design history of the  “aggressively economical” housing that took over Los Angeles — the latest in our Iconic Home Designs series. 

• A new museum is getting Americans to confront its racist past by linking slavery to the modern U.S. economy. The Legacy Museum, from justice advocate Bryan Stevenson, opened Friday in Montgomery, Alabama — on land that was occupied by a cotton warehouse. (Bloomberg)

• We first visited Songdo in 2018. Three years later, South Korea’s smart city from scratch is bustling, and could become a model for the future of urban planning. Take a video tour with our reporters. (Bloomberg)

• Apple picking is the quintessential Insta-worthy fall activity for urban dwellers. It’s also a bizarre imitation of hard work. (Vox)
• Why climate change is making it harder to chase fall foliage (
  Associated Press)
• A soundtrack for an unfolding climate disaster (
  New Yorker)
• If you had a chance to travel anywhere, where would you go? Here’s why one writer picked Spokane, Washington, of all places (
  New York Times)
• In Washington, D.C., Wendy’s wants to get paid for surrendering the infamous “Dave Thomas Circle,” so it hired a Trump lawyer (
  Eater)
• Also from the region, those zebras that escaped a farm in Prince George’s County a month earlier are still roaming around. Could this be the start of a viable population in Maryland? (
  DCist)
• A Dutch grocery store opens “chat registers” for lonely customers who aren’t in a hurry (
  Vice)

• martystagram photographs a middle school painted in baby blue in Hong Kong.
• mike.r.reiss overlooks the painted streets of New York’s Chinatown
• sakeontheradio captures the unique embellishments of a building in Buenos Aires.
• gracieful marvels at an impressive playground in Spokane, Washington.

Tag us with the hashtag #citylabontheground so we can shout out your photos on CityLab’s Instagram page or pull them together for the next edition of Navigator.