Key to the City: Showing Off the Big Apple

The news out of New York is especially welcome — specifically, that a new public art project has reinstated the panache of offering the key to the city to a dignitary, visiting or otherwise. That practice has been taken over by excess or just plain ignored for too long now. In this case, the dignitaries receiving the keys are none other than the good people of New York City and the keys are gateways to learning more about the city and its sites.

The art project in question is literally titled "The Key to the City" and is the creation of Paul Ramirez Jonas. Rather than giving the literal key to the literal city, the project, a collaboration with a nonprofit entity known as Creative Time, will give a large number of keys to a large number of people and all the keys will be able to open all the locks.

One key will open a hidden closet in the master bedroom of Gracie Mansion, New York's official mayoral residence. Another key will open a concealed door leading to a private exhibition of Faberge jewels at the Brooklyn Museum.

That's the sublime. There's also the fun, as in one key will unlock a box at a Queens ice cream shop and reveal a coupon good for an extra scoop of ice cream for the lucky key-holder.

Dozens of sites are sprinkled throughout the city's five boroughs. Keys will be given out until June 27.

Such a giant key undertaking is nothing new for Jonas, who also gifted the people of Cambridge, Mass., with 5,000 keys that opened up the gate of a city park. All residents got identical keys to symbolize (and, perhaps, reinforce) a sense of joint ownership of the park.

That joint ownership will extend not only to the people who get keys and explore what's behind locked doors but also to the shared experiences that many people will have getting to see the wide variety of special attractions that the Big Apple has to offer. The key to the city, it could be argued, is for its residents to want to continue to live in it and show it off and for its visitors to want to continue to come back and see the sites therein.