The museum is closed, but the tomato man carries on
The halls of the Guggenheim Museum are pretty quiet these days, with mostly just its ghosts and some security guards as company for the art.
Oh, and there’s the guy who takes care of the tomatoes.
David Litvin, an indoor-crop specialist, tends the plants in a temporarily shuttered exhibition, “Countryside, The Future.” He moved to New York from Tel Aviv in February, along with his wife, Stefanie, and their Dutch shepherd, Ester, with a plan to stay six months harvesting the Guggenheim tomatoes that are growing in a greenhouse outside.
He was going to see the city, too.
“I went out once to a comedy bar, but that’s it,” he said.
The museum has been closed since March 13, but Litvin still walks across Central Park every day around noon from his rental on the Upper West Side to tend his flock. “When you grow tomatoes on Fifth Avenue, you want to have the perfect tomatoes; there’s no room to mess up,” he said. “If I have ugly plants, I’ll hear it from the neighbors.”
These days, you can’t visit the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or soak in “The Starry Night” at the Museum of Modern Art. But you can still stand in front of the Guggenheim and get a good look at a thicket of cherry tomato vines and a really big tractor.
The tomatoes, housed in what looks like a radioactive shipping container on the sidewalk, were on view as part of the exhibition for just three weeks before the city folded in on itself. But they’re still growing, their vines snipped every Tuesday and donated to City Harvest, at least 100 pounds at a time.
“This tomato-growing module couldn’t just be turned off with the lights,” said Guggenheim curator Troy Conrad Therrien, who organized the exhibition with architect Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal of AMO, the research arm of Koolhaas’ firm. “We brought the exhibition to the street, and the street is still accessible.”
The tractor is a top-of-the-line Deutz-Fahr 9340 TTV Warrior. It has a computer in the cab, can lift more than 26,000 pounds, and looks completely out of place on the Upper East Side. But the tomatoes look nice there.
Litvin works for 80 Acres Farms, a company that grows organic produce, including cucumbers, leafy greens and herbs, at giant indoor farms where controlled environments allow for year-round harvesting.
While at the museum, Litvin prefers to work in the afternoon and evening to avoid crowds in Central Park, and because of the bees. The tomatoes need to be pollinated, so he has two small hives going in the module at a time, each living out of a specially designed cardboard box with little doors that open and close on a timer. This way, he can confine the bees’ working hours to the morning so he doesn’t have to share 700 square feet with 100 agitated co-workers.
“I get them shipped to me here at the museum,” he said of the beehives. “The guards are like, ‘What the hell is that humming noise?’ ”
The technology Litvin is using at the museum is the same as in his commercial work. He controls the temperature, humidity and amount of “daytime” the tomatoes get. The light’s color maximizes energy efficiency, because the plants absorb only certain light from the spectrum. Raised on a diet of sunshine and rainwater they are not, but they taste like the best juicy ones found in backyards in August.
In the context of the exhibition, these tomatoes — specifically, they’re Brioso tomatoes — are meant to reflect the potential future of agriculture, a contrast to monocrop farms and their hulking, high-tech tractors like the TTV Warrior, Therrien said.
“The supply chains are not just being disrupted but being reconfigured,” he said. “Cities are battlegrounds in the pandemic, and the ability to move agriculture into cities is no longer just a flight of fancy for agriculture students who want to put gardens on top of skyscrapers.”
Litvin said that several people walking by have asked if they can buy some of his tomatoes. But he gently tells them no.
“City Harvest gets them all,” he said. “Well, my wife gets some, too. She deserves some.”