by Julia C. Reischel

The art installation that has placed Somerville in the heart of national and international media attention was fêted at City Hall Thursday before being taken down for good.

“This will be over very soon,” said Geoff Hargadon, or Hargo, the creator of “Somerville Gates,” which gained international fame last week after being featured in a The New York Times article. “It will have a very short life span.”

The project, a series of tiny orange gates arranged around Hargadon’s cat Edie, was temporarily dismantled on Feb. 24 and transported across town to City Hall, where it were briefly exhibited on Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone’s desk.

It was then returned to its original location, where it awaited the arrival of the cleaning lady.

Geoff Hargadon said Monday the Somerville Gates were dismantled in a small ceremony. He said that Edie the cat did not attend—she was sleeping.

At the Thursday reception, Curtatone read a proclamation establishing Feb. 24, 2005  as “Hargo Day.”

“Hargo Day was established to recognize the importance of thrift, ingenuity and artistic parody,” the mayor said. “Almost 3 million visitors have viewed Somerville Gates, thrusting out great city into the local, national, and international imagination through a love of cats and an ironic sense of superiority over New York City.”

The proclamation stressed that all the materials used for the “Somerville Gates” installation, besides Edie the cat, were purchased and displayed locally. 

After the mayor congratulated Hargadon, dignitaries and guests snacked from a selection of entirely orange delicacies at the following reception.

The mayor said that for general notoriety, the “Somerville Gates” has probably done more than any other news item to catapult Somerville to national fame.

“It’s great for the city,” said Curtatone. “I hope it spurs ingenuity among people in our community.”

Brother Cleve, a Somerville native and friend of Hargadon’s, said that he had just returned to the US from India and therefore did not know about “The Gates” in New York City until he hard heard of the installation. 

“I read in Saturday’s Boston Herald that he was a local celebrity,” Cleve said.  “I went to the Web site after I got e-mails about it from friends around the country.”

Cleve was pleased with the attention Hargadon’s installation brought to the city.

“It makes Somerville more than just most densely populated city on the East Coast,” he said. “We have our own ‘Gates’ now. I’m really glad to see them on the mayor’s desk.”

“I’m pleased that people are getting the humor,” said Erika K. Schutte, a Somerville resident who read about the reception on Hargadon’s Web site. 

She came to City Hall to see whether the reception honoring the Somerville Gates was a joke, said Schutte, who is a local artist.

At a meeting of the Board of Aldermen later that evening on Hargo Day, Ward 4 Alderman Walter F. Pero asked for a special order allowing the mayor to read the Hargo Day proclamation again. 

Hargadon’s father drove up from North Carolina for the occasion, who was joined at the ceremony by Hargadon’s wife, Patricia LaValley.

Hargadon said he created “Somerville Gates” in response to “The Gates,” a $20-million-dollar art installation exhibited in New York City’s Central Park last week by master-wrapper artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude. 

Inspired by a photograph of Christo’s “The Gates” that appeared on the Feb. 13 front page of The New York Times, Hargadon set out to create a Somerville version of the art phenomenon. 

“Couldn’t help noticing the amount of hype ‘The Gates’ in New York was getting,” Hargadon said. “The amount of attention it was getting deserved some attention.”

"I got an idea, some extra sheets of the stuff that covers our kitchen windows, and some orange tempera I had lying around, and then I went to Home Depot,” Hargadon said.

In a couple of hours and for a total cost of about $3.50, he constructed 13 gates, he said.

He is aware of the scale difference between his own 13-gate work and Christo’s “The Gates,” which had 7,500. Hargadon said, “I thought fewer would be funnier.”

Once the individual gates were completed, Hargadon and his wife arranged them in a series of installations surrounding their cat, Edie, as she moved throughout their Somerville loft, he said.

Hargadon posted the photographs on his Web site: not-rocket-science.com Feb. 15, and e-mailed several of his friends the link. 

“It was all very accidental,” said Hargadon. “I put it up as a gag for my friends, and before you know it, it exploded.”

By Feb. 17, CNN was calling, he said.

After The New York Times ran an article Feb. 19 “Somerville Gates,” which became its third most e-mailed story on their Web site many days thereafter, he said.

Foreign news services ran the article in other countries.  The small town in Colombia where Hargadon grew up contacted him for an interview.  The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The Washington Post, and a slew of other news outlets contacted him for interviews. 

Hargadon said that immediately, hits on his website catapulted from 200 to 4 million per day.

“A week ago I wouldn’t have believed this was possible,” he said.

Hargadon said that he received hundreds of e-mails a day from fans from around the world, and has read each one. 

“The one thing that every reaction has in common is laughter,” he said. “I got e-mails that said: ‘I spit coffee on my monitor, I inhaled milk up my nose.’”

One of the most memorable emails he received, Hargadon said, was from a soldier in Iraq.  “He said appreciated getting cheered up,” said Hargadon.

Hargadon said that the overwhelming response to his art was a reaction to the installation’s many themes.

“It was about art, about the media, about Somerville, and about cats,” he said.

“I think it struck a bunch of different nerves in people. People are not interpreting this as some major artistic statement, but it’s making them reflect,” he said.

For example, Edie the cat’s central role in the “Somerville Gates” sparked much reflection about the role of cats in art, he said.

“We brought the gates to her,” Hargadon said.  “While in New York City people went to the Gates, here in Somerville the gates went to the cat.

“I like how uninterested she looks,” he said. “Here are people paying all this fuss to “The Gates,” and she just couldn’t care less.”

The public response to Edie has been tremendous. 

“Cats want to meet our cat, dogs want to meet our cat, birds were offered,” Hargadon said. “People offered catnip, cat food, pictures, and videos of cats.”

Brother Cleve said that when he saw New York City’s version of “The Gates” on television, he noticed something was missing.

“I thought, ‘Oh, so that’s really what it looks like,’” he said. “‘But where’s the cat?’”

Hargadon he said he insists that the “Somerville Gates” are not meant to disparage Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s New York City project.

“The fact that our cat has the color of Jeanne-Claude’s hair is a total coincidence,” he said.

Hargadon says that he is a fan of Christo’s work, and that in fact he and his wife traveled to New York to see “The Gates” in person in Central Park. 

“I was really excited about it,” he said. “New York must be overall very happy it was there. I’m glad I saw it.” 

The “Somerville Gates” has unearthed a deep vein of Somerville pride, said Hargadon, a city resident of five years.      

He said, “Maybe it’s just been dormant,” he said.  “People from New York, Philadelphia, California, and around the world have emailed to tell me, ‘Hey, I’ve lived in Somerville.’”

One of Hargadon’s favorite emails was from a diehard Somerville fan, he said.

At the aldermen’s meeting Hargadon read from the diehard’s e-mail: “’Having grown up in Somerville and seeing it through its awkward years,’ she wrote, ‘I am finally able to dig my old cheerleading jacket out of mothballs and proudly tell the world that, yes, I am a product of that Somerville, the one with “The Gates.” I feel reborn.’