She’d returned to the Spur to welcome the pigeon’s successor, a fifty-ton Buddha by the Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. It was a crisp night in April. Drivers honked below, struggling to bypass an enormous crane and a flatbed truck idling by a turnoff to the Lincoln Tunnel. “On the way here, I wondered what all the traffic was about,” Alemani said. “Then I realized it was us!” The park had the air of a stage before showtime. Workers mixed mortar and drove a scissor lift to the edge of a concrete plinth surmounted by four steel rods—supports for the Buddha, whose sandstone body would slide down them in four parts, like beads in an abacus. As the first block was hoisted, Alemani darted to the railing to take a picture. “Look at those feet!” she said. “They’re so cute!”
