“Making it shine: It seems that practically everyone in Chicago has an opinion on whether or not it has taken just a little too long to finish and finally unveil Anish Kapoor’s dazzling, crowd-pleasing `Cloud Gate,’ a.k.a. the Bean.”
On a recent morning in Millennium Park, a large blob of snow shaped like Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark clung to one side of Anish Kapoor’s 66-foot-long, 33-foot-high, 42-foot-wide super-shiny, bean-shaped sculpture, but not a single tourist clamored around it the way visitors did back when it was warm. If not for a lone security guard trying to keep warm on the empty plaza, you’d have thought the Bean had been abandoned completely.
But inside a small tent filling the arc of space beneath the Bean, 12 members of Ironworkers Local 63 were polishing away, trying to finish their highly specialized work on the vortexlike portion known as the omphalos (which is a stone in the Temple at Delphi, once considered the center of the world; it is also a fancy word for “belly button”).
After the much larger tent covering the entire Bean was removed in September, they took a break; a reduced crew returned to the site in October. “When we were on the outside, we had 22 to 24 guys,” said Danny Kozyra, the general foreman, by cell phone from inside the mini-tent. “If you put that many of us in here now we’d be like the circus. It would be like a Volkswagen, with everyone running out all the time.”
They expect to have the omphalos-polishing finished by the end of winter. “It’s been pretty darn cold. I’m here 45 minutes early, getting the place heated up, so when the time 6 a.m. rolls around we’re ready for action,” said Kozyra, who adds everything is going smoothly, despite some new challenges, including adjusting their specialized sanding instruments to accommodate the concave rather than convex surface.
Once the job is finished, Kozyra has no idea what he’ll be doing. “The industry is pretty busy right now. I could be in any one of a million places,” he says. But Kozyra would welcome another challenge like the Bean, which he describes as the pinnacle of his 17-year career — and, he guesses, of his crew’s. “I think everybody will keep parts of this close to their heart for the rest of their lives,” he says.
Would he consider a Bean-worker’s reunion? “Well I would never say never — that would be a darn good idea. … Maybe in 25 or 30 years, they’ll say get those crabby old [guys] out of their house and bring them down here and let them look at it. Maybe we’ll be on the History Channel.”
