By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

As workers continue to remove all traces of 7,500 saffron gates from New York’s Central Park, a Lewiston native treasures a tiny swatch of the gates’ fabric, the color of a cheese puff.

It’s Jessica Kemper’s only souvenir of the massive art installation she helped to erect.

Not that she minds. The entire project, erected for just 16 days in the Manhattan park in February, was always meant to be fleeting, like all the works of the husband and wife artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

After all, this is the pair that temporarily surrounded several islands near Miami with Pepto-Bismol-colored bunting and once wrapped the German Reichstag in fabric, the way some ladies cover a poorly upholstered couch.

“It’s art for art’s sake,” said Kemper, a 1996 graduate of Lewiston High School. “Christo says there is no bigger point.”

The aim of “The Gates” was merely to make people look at Central Park differently, said the young woman, who currently works with urban planners and designers at the Program for the New York Foundation for Architecture.

For her, the aim worked.

“I’ve always felt like a weekend visitor to Central Park,” Kemper said. Now, it’s familiar territory.

Kemper became involved with the project last August, after hearing that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were soliciting help online.

A fan of the theirs, she sent them an e-mail. Then she forgot about it. Periodically, she received follow-up questions; often, some sounded a bit random.

For instance, one question asked if she could lift 37 pounds. Others gathered her work details and so on.

Finally, she was chosen to be one of 600 workers tasked with assembling and raising the gates. She boarded one of a convoy of school buses and headed out of Manhattan.

“They took us out to this warehouse in Queens,” Kemper said. Inside was the mass of materials that would create “The Gates,” eventually covering 23 miles of park footpaths.

The daylong session taught the staff, whom Christo described as “paid volunteers,” how to install the tall gates, bolt them together and slide them into heavy bases. Each gate was 16 feet high. They had varying widths. Saffron-colored fabric panels were suspended from each one.

The project’s organization was a marvel to the Lewiston native. Christo and his staff divided the park into areas and divided those into sections, where work was assigned to teams for the weeklong setup, which preceded the Feb. 12 opening.

Kemper joined an 11-member team that included a pair of German tree climbers. Together, they went to work in the park’s northeast corner.

They quickly learned that the strength questions had been justified. They started slowly, completing just three gates during the first half of the first day.

At lunch, Christo stopped by and made small talk.

“He was very nice and down-to-earth,” Kemper said.

The team hit its stride in the day’s second half, erecting 30 gates before they were through. By the week’s end, her team had erected 100 of the 7,500 gates.

During its 16-day life, the art installation drew more than 4 million visitors, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office.

Among them were Kemper, who took her parents to see it and also surveyed the unusually bright wintertime view of the park from Rockefeller Center.

“The Gates” began coming down on Feb. 28. The cleanup is expected to last until March 15.

Kemper acquired a new appreciation of the famous park’s curves, slopes and moods.

“I now know what it looks like at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday, with the runners and the dog walkers,” she said. “I know what it looks like at sunset.”

Thanks to “The Gates,” it’s her park now.