“Here is special,” Edson Fonseca, a soft-spoken Brazilian landscaper, said one recent morning, while watering the grassy hills that, since September 10th, have engulfed the Getty gas station at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue, in Chelsea.
“Is this a park?” a woman on the sidewalk asked Fonseca, who had built the hills of dirt and sod.
“You built me a putting green!” a smiling man in a business suit remarked as he walked by.
“Where am I supposed to get my snacks?” a woman in a dirty shirt asked, pointing to the gas station’s now dark convenience store.
Dogs strained at their leashes. An old man squatted down and patted the sod appreciatively. A policeman drove up, parked his van, got out, and asked warily, “What’s going on here?”
In August, the real-estate developer Michael Shvo bought the quarter-acre lot with the gas station on it for $23.5 million. After a high-flying career as a real-estate broker, Shvo turned to luxury property development in New York and the Middle East, then took a hiatus from real estate and focussed on collecting art. He plans to replace the Getty station with what he calls “ultra-high-end condos,” but until construction starts, he will use the lot for art installations. Fonseca’s grassy hills are part of the first project, a meadow populated by twenty-five sheep sculptures by the late French surrealist artist François-Xavier Lalanne.
Fonseca was recommended to Shvo by Drew Aaron, a paper-company C.E.O. who had hired the landscaper to create an English garden on his Greenwich estate. Fonseca knew no one when he arrived in New York with one suitcase, in 1985, and he now looks after a dozen large properties in Connecticut.
Shvo says that, during one visit to the Getty station site, Fonseca handed him six quarters. The landscaper’s explanation: “My father told me that if you find something on somebody’s property, you have to give it back to him.” Shvo keeps the quarters in a drawer for luck.
On the day the sculptures were installed, passersby wondered how much the sheep cost. Fonseca told one of them, “I don’t know. I heard ten thousand dollars. I heard fifty thousand dollars. I think that can’t be right. It’s mostly concrete.” (Shvo said that he bought his first Lalanne sheep in 2007, for thirty thousand dollars. They are worth at least two hundred thousand dollars each.) Fonseca has no strong feelings about the Lalanne sculptures, but he loves animals. The afternoon when the sheep arrived, he paced around the edges of the lot, peering into the branches of the arborvitae trees that line the perimeter. He was looking for a praying mantis that he had found during construction. He had named him Billy, after Billy the Kid. (Fonseca learned English by watching Westerns.)
“At first, Michael said, ‘We have to spray for ticks,’ ” Fonseca recalled. “I said, ‘If we spray for ticks, we will kill all the creatures,’ like this beautiful one.” He cupped his hands around the mantis. “Or the crickets. Listen.” After the roar of a passing truck died down, a bit of cricket song was heard.
“It would be nice if they would keep the grass here,” he said. “New York has lots of buildings. It only has one of this.”
Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.
