The potential for disaster was huge. Just two weeks before Christo's monumental art project "The Gates" was scheduled to be unveiled in New York's Central Park, the snow began falling. And falling. And falling. Soon, an almost two-foot thick blanket covered the the entire city -- including the thousands of steel mini-foundations that formed the framework of what was to be one of New York City's most ambitious public art projects ever.

Failure, however, was no longer an option. For a quarter century, "The Gates" project has been a dream of the artist couple Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, famous for creating cloth cocoons for buildings (the Reichstag in 1995), bridges (Paris's Pont-Neuf in 1985), enormous hot pink aprons for a string of islands (Florida in 1983), and a running across hills (California 1972-76). Having spent years persuading the Central Park administration to accept the project and acquiring the appropriate city permits, a little weather was the last thing the artists would let hold the project back. Ten tractors and 170 snow shovels later, the project was up again.

"Now," laughs Wolfgang Volz, a German who has worked with Christo for 34 years, and who is coordinating the installation of "The Gates" as well as serving as its official photographer, "everything will just cost a little more money."

Like most of Christo's projects, this one is perhaps most notable for its dimensions. Gates draped with saffron-colored cloth -- fully 7,500 of them spaced exactly 3.65 meters apart -- are to frame 37 kilometers-worth of Central Park pathways. They will sit in 15,000 steel foundation stands and will support a total of 101,250 square meters (1,089,846 square feet) of material. And the whole project -- at least the bits of vinyl that will bring the work to windblown life -- is scheduled to be installed in one single day, Friday, Feb. 12.

Volz is the one that will make it happen. A native of the city Duesseldorf on the banks of the Rhine River in western Germany, Volz is now feverishly organizing the installation out of a small container temporarily set up in a Central Park parking lot. The thin, wavy-haired, personable photographer has been working with Christo and Jeanne-Claude ever since he was a 23-year-old student in the industrial city of Essen and was commissioned to do a photo shoot of Christo. It's not just Volz's photography skills that Christo is relying on; his excellent logistical skills are just as valuable for the oversized works.

For this one -- at a cost of $20 million and paid for by Christo, originally from Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude, of France -- he has 600 workers under his command. They've already put the foundations into place and have included orange markers to prevent them from being lost in the blanket of whiteness. The foundations will hold up the almost five-meter-tall frames of the gates. The frames, too, are likewise popping up throughout the park. Meanwhile, many more workers have prepared the vinyl sails that will transform the park into Christo's vision of a "golden river." While the current project doesn't require life-threatening acrobatics like the Reichstag wrap job (for which Volz learned to rope climb and rappell), the battle with the snow is just as challenging.

In the end, though, it is Volz's photography that will allow the installation -- only scheduled to be in place for 16 days -- to live on in the form of posters, picture books and calendars. The sales of his stylized, precisely composed portraits of Christo's gigantic happenings -- some of them autographed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and sold for as much as $600,000 each -- serve to fund the next colossal project. A successful photographer in Germany in his own right, Volz is multi-tasking during his stay in New York. On display in Chelsea this month is his first-ever photo exhibition in New York.

"The art scene in New York is of an extremely large magnitude," says Volz, the only official photographer for "The Gates." "If one isn't present there, one quickly disappears from the scene."

Volz isn't the only one benefiting from the Central Park project. Despite years of skepticism -- which only ended with the help of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is an avid Christo fan -- the city of New York stands to gain as well from "The Gates." Hotels in New York, particularly those surrounding the park, have been reporting much lower vacancy rates than normal for this time of year. The city expects that up to 200,000 people will travel to the city just to get a firsthand look at the artwork. According to The New York Times, many of them are Christo groupies  who collect souvenirs from his projects and make it a priority to visit each of his new installations (some, in fact, have already arrived and are posting their observations on the ongoing set up in a blog created specifically for the project ).