A tree grows in the Meatpacking District

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Renzo Piano-designed building in the Meatpacking District has been welcomed as a powerful architectural addition to New York’s museum landscape. The institution’s new home includes a piece of soft landscaping that could easily be overlooked: a “Red Sunset” maple tree. No ordinary plant, it was personally picked by Adam Weinberg, the museum’s director, from a farm upstate. “I knew I was going to be seeing it every day on my walk in to work, so I wanted to be sure I’d like it,” Weinberg told us during a tour of the museum.