July 19, 2006
Flowers for Taxi Cabs' 100th Anniversary
City yellow cabs will get more colorful in the fall of 2007 as the city embarks on a project to decorate cabs with flower decals. Yes, you heard it right - the City of New York is working on the temporary, mobile public art project, Garden in Transit, which will "celebrate the 100th anniversary of New York’s first motorized taxi." Starting this fall, children will paint flowers onto decals that will then be placed on thousands of yellow cabs. Cab owners will not be required to put the decals on, but they can certainly volunteer their cabs for the project - and we suspect many will, as they will probably be attractive to that all important taxi fare - the tourist. (But we'll have to ask New York Hack and Famous Fat Dave if they will.) The cabs will flower for 16 weeks, from September through December 2007.
This is sort of like when the painted cows and apples came to the city, but melding art with the cabs is interesting, if a little disconnected - we hope the city can support community gardens and open spaces where real flowers actually grow. The project was proposed by Portraits of Hope, which uses art as a therapeutic tool for children and adults, so it's hard to argue with that aspect. What do you think?
The "Garden in Transit" program also needs adult volunteers to help the kids paint the decals - here's more information.
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Maybe instead of pictures of flowers on the cabs, they should try real flowers in the cabs, to at least nullify the stench of B.O. and dirty water hot dog farts.
Why does public art always have to be so bland?
I'm an employee of Portraits of Hope and am working on the Garden in Transit project. I strongly disagree with the description of this project as bland. Please check out our website and see that we include participants of all ages from hospitals, schools, and community institutions all over the city. To involve over 40,000 children and volunteers in a massive collaborative effort and show of civic pride is far from bland.
Not to degrade your work MelanieGIT, the project itself as a concept sounds cool. But so far every cab I've seen looks exactly the same as the next one which I must say is quite bland. Why not give these children the freedom to create something unique? It looks like they were just given a paint by numbers kit or something! If given a subject as simple as "flowers" I'm sure any child, artistic or not, could come up with something quite beautiful on their own.
I don't think it's bland at all. I find it colorful and friendly and cheerful and I'm not a tourist. I will be very sorry to see it go away in January especially if it was a very cold winter.
I'm looking forward to seeing a completely decked out cab. So far, I've only seen ones with the hood and trunk decorated.
Frankly, I can't think of any good reason to remove them.
i think it's kind of cool. it adds color and life to the city, especially when busy, crowded, traffic filled streets can be so stressful. i was hoping the flowers on the cabs meant they went hybrid - or something about the environment. it's still nice to see - color on anything is never bad.