(Photo: AP)

A TV celebrity was married, a great museum reopened, and a giant electronic snowflake was installed over midtown. Yet somehow it was a week richer in anticipation than in actual event. Star Jones was wed to a Wall Street trader in St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, but her nuptials went almost entirely unnoticed by many New Yorkers because she neglected to place an announcement in the wedding pages of the New York Times, perhaps failing to realize that such announcements are free. At the end of a weeklong string of progressively less-exclusive parties, the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art finally opened its revolving doors to the masses. It was pronounced “nearly perfect” by its architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, and most critics agreed, save for the refreshingly bilious Hilton Kramer, who called it “cold and elephantine.” The holiday season was prematurely ushered in by the suspension of an enormous snowflake over the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Created by a German lighting designer, the all-new flake is bedizened with 12,000 Baccarat crystals and 462 light-emitting-diode and strobe fixtures, which makes it most cheerful. At the Bronx Zoo, a reindeer called Bucky, who will serve as a Christmas mascot, underwent cosmetic surgery to reattach a portion of its antler that had fallen off when the reindeer butted something too hard. New York submitted its final bid to be the host of the 2012 Summer Olympics, remaining hopeful even though the smart money is on Paris. To the dismay of secular humanists, it was reported that as many as 1.5 million Evangelical Christians have made their home in the five boroughs. Patience and Fortitude, the stone lions who guard the entrance to the New York Public library, and who are as iconic of this city as the horses of San Marco are of Venice, got a makeover to counter the aging effects of weathering. And Harvey Weinstein quashed rumors that he was about to abandon the city for London: “Once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker.”

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Jim Holt
• Table of Contents: November 29, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!