New York Mysteries: The Outbreak instaling

The trip serves as a useful decompression chamber between Sodom and Gomorrah and Eden - an overture to “City,” through an increasingly barren, eye-popping landscape. That’s not quite enough people to fill the smallest Triple-A ballpark in America.Īnd aside from Heizer, none of those 5,177 people live in Garden Valley, roughly a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas. This is Lincoln County, twice the size of Connecticut, whose few residents include ranchers and pensioners, Mormon families commuting to jobs at Nellis Air Force Base, and service-station employees along the Great Basin Highway, a hairy two-lane route. “City” is hard to spot in a mountain-rimmed sprawl of wash and scrub called Garden Valley.

The dusty road to Heizer’s Sleep Late Ranch. “This is a masterpiece, or close to it,” he said, “and I’m the only one who cares whether the thing is actually done.” At 77, in rapidly failing health, he is as pessimistic as ever. “I’m a fool, alone, helplessly watching as they wait for me to die so they can turn my ranch into a gift shop and motel,” Heizer told me here this spring. Even so, its creator, the toast of downtown New York during the 1970s who turned into art’s Fitzcarraldo, still doesn’t consider “City” finished. It had become the art-world version of ancient Atlantis, a chimera.Īrt-world Atlantis will shortly be accepting reservations. Now, half a century after Heizer stuck his first shovel in the ground, “City” is finally opening to visitors, which may be the most unbelievable thing of all.

At both ends of the site, monumental structures riff on ancient ruins. Exquisitely groomed dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions like dry lake beds spread out in no immediately obvious order and in different directions. That it cost $40 million to build.Įven that it’s called “City.” It’s a city in name only. That the nearest blacktop is an hour’s drive away, on a dusty, bumpy, former livestock trail, across a couple of mountain ranges. That it’s a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, smack in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert, where what passes for a neighbor is Area 51. Nearly everything about Michael Heizer’s land art megasculpture called “City” can seem hard to fathom.

Photographs by Todd Heisler Video by Noah Throop Aug.

New York Mysteries: The Outbreak instaling