THE FLOOR MOVED.(The Talk of the Town)(moving the New York Liberty from Madison Square Garden to Radio City Music Hall)

Madison Square Garden has officially closed up shop, more than a month before the opening of the Republican National Convention. No more concerts or wrestling entertainment or women's hoops until school resumes. The other night, the New York Liberty, the Garden's primary summer tenant, beat the Charlotte Sting at home, 75-58, and immediately afterward began to move everything the team owns up to Radio City Music Hall, the Garden's corporate sister (both venues are owned by Cablevision) and, as of the next day, the city's newest sports arena. No sooner had Maddie, the Liberty's giant dog mascot, removed his head than three Garden employees were busy deflating beach balls to be packed with the rest of the team's bountiful and varied inventory, which within minutes was being wheeled by the cartload to the freight elevator. Many of the items were tagged with orange stickers that read "Camel Room," identifying their destination: the steel-reinforced holding pen for the Christmas-show dromedaries. Other labels specified "Room 303" and "Room 503"--Rockette dressing rooms that would be doubling as locker rooms.

Planning the overnight evacuation of a women's basketball franchise is no small task, judging by the Liberty's master move list. Consider this small sample of the outgoing cargo: three sumo mats, two biohazard containers, four Frisbees, one basketball court, several hundred pink towels, twelve knish warmers, one ultrasound machine, two "Little Tikes" shopping carts, one disco ball, three backboards, twelve megaphones.

The court itself comprises two hundred and twenty-five interlocking pieces of buffed maple, most of them eight feet by four. (The most famous basketball floor, the old Boston Garden parquet, consisted of two hundred and forty-seven squares.) To remove it requires a drill (for unscrewing the bolts that hold the pieces together), a long hook (for tugging the pieces apart once the bolts have been removed), and a good number of large men--four to lift each piece, one to drive the forklift on which the pieces are then stacked, and several more to mill around in some kind of supervisory capacity. Working at a brisk pace, the Garden crew had the floor waiting in the loading bay in about three hours.

Uptown at Radio City, meanwhile, Elton John had to move out before the Liberty could move in, and so commuters on Fifty-first Street the following morning were greeted on the sidewalk by semi-collapsed basketball hoops that resembled giraffes awaiting entry through the stage-door ramp. Inside, standing on the stage, ...