Clearly this has been a good week for the color orange, traditionally the ugly stepsister of yellow, purple, and red. Orange has just taken over Central Park, with the unfurling of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates Project.” Meanwhile, all the way at the southern tip of the island, orange is the color of the good ship Molinari, the newest ferry in the Staten Island fleet, which can now be seen pulling out of the spanking new Whitehall Ferry Terminal.

As regards the former, shortly before 8:31 on Saturday morning, when the fabric gates began to be unfurled from their lintels, I assumed a perch high above Central Park West, in the San Remo. But very quickly it became clear that, even through leafless trees, it would be difficult to gain any sense of the artwork from above, and so I went down into the park, where the work progressed over the ensuing two hours.

Here is my verdict: The 7,500 16-foot-tall posts, covering 23 miles of the park’s trails, do not seem, either singly or collectively, to possess a compelling visual interest. From a purely formalist perspective, the totalizing ambition of the work is greatly qualified by the many intervals or synapses that exist between the sequences of gates and that were necessitated by the nature of the territory.

It should be said, however, that these Gates are not ugly, as I had feared they might be, and as I have found other works by Christo to be.

The primary appeal of the Gates – more intellectual than perceptual – has always consisted in their pure stunt value, in the appreciation of the thousands of minute calibrations required to create a sense of uniformity. This was achieved by fitting structures of varying breadth and plinths of varying height into their specific contexts. To this precision we must add the massiveness of the preparations, with a logistical coordination that boggles the mind.

Like all effective “earth art,” the Gates do succeed in thoroughly transforming their ecological context. Their closest parallel is the snowstorm that hit the city a few weeks ago and the blooming of the trees that we can look forward to a few months hence. But the artistic value of the Gates project is less important than its civic value.

By it very nature, the park is one of the happier precincts of the city, a place to which people repair precisely to do what they like and precisely to avoid what they do not. Yet never before have I seen – especially on a winter’s day – such a surfeit of high spirits.

Unlike the normal happiness of the park, refracted through a million private satisfactions, here it was all concentrated in the overwhelming pleasure of participation in a great event. Old men and young children on the shoulders of their parents took turns hooking a loop with a pole and pulling on it until the skirted gates spilled from their lintels to the ovations of the onlookers.

There was a sense that history was being made. It was not the usual kind of history, consisting of wars and revolutions that always end badly for someone. Rather it resonated in the knowledge that a new and ineradicable im age had been deposited into the collective memory banks of the citizens of New York, that years hence people would still be talking of this.

As someone who vociferated often against the project when it was in the planning stages, I must admit that, in what is perhaps the bleakest season of year, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have contributed more to the sum total of our collective happiness than I ever imagined possible.

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If truth be told, both the new ferry and the new station it leaves from are an architectural disappointment. Though I recently wrote a column praising the Port Authority and the MTA for an unexpected sensitivity to design, the same is not true of the Department of Transportation.

To say that the Molinari lacks imagination is a pallid understatement. In fact, it is almost an archeological re-enactment of all the other ferries in the fleet, most of them designed in the Truman administration and garishly revised in the age of Abba. Though there is a whole art to naval architecture, you will find no evidence of it in this ferry, which is longer than a city block and taller than a row house.

As I do not frequently ride the ferry, when I first saw it I assumed I was looking at one of the older models. Only when I boarded did I sense, despite the patented tackiness of the design, a suspicious freshness to the metal walls and floorings.

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Perhaps the best that can be said of the new Whitehall Ferry Terminal is that, whereas the Molinari is five decades out of date, the station is only two decades out of date. Since it was designed by Frederic Schwartz of Schwartz Architects, an outspoken firebrand in the debate surrounding the World Trade Center site, I had expected something far more dynamic than what was unveiled last week.

Specificities aside, the overall effect of the building is that it looks exactly as you would expect a piece of urban infrastructure to look. Too boring to be an eyesore, this whitish, neo-Modernist cage is best when its 200,000-square-foot interior, seen from the outside, glows in the night. By day, however, the irregularly angled mass of its standard-issue curtain walls is unappealing.

True, the interior has the benefits of openness, brightness, and that cleanness so endearing in buildings that are seven hours old. But with its 75 foot ceilings and five escalators that draw 65,000 passengers a day to the gates, this very expansiveness feels formless, given that the space is supported, but not structured, by a few paltry pylons. Aside from zippers of light that tell time and announce approaching ferries, there is some cutesy signage (the toilets are designated as “H2O”) and a bank of granitic seats, which I overheard one acidulated commuter compare (and not by way of a compliment) to those of Fred Flintstone’s apartment.

We may look forward – if that is the word – to a renovation of the St. George ferry station on the Staten Island end. It is already in use, even if still under construction. Unfortunately, it promises to be no lovelier than its Manhattan counterpart.