Seattle’s Department of Parks and Recreation has approved a controversial rock sculpture be added to the Counterbalance Park located at the foot of Queen Anne Hill.
The proposed sculpture includes five slabs of rock, three shorter pieces and two taller ones. According to Seattle Parks spokeswoman Dewey Potter, the shorter pieces will be embedded in the ground in the center of the park, located at the corner of Roy Street and Queen Anne Avenue North. The larger slabs will be located in a corner of the park.
While this decision may seem relatively innocuous on the surface, the move has created a public relations mess for the City of Seattle and the Uptown Alliance, the organization that helped push for the creation of the park. The center of the controversy is the alliance’s decision to spend at least $9,000 to add the rock sculptures to the park. The idea behind the sculpture was to honor a local business leader who had donated a large amount of money toward building the park back in 2008.
The alliance, a group of well-meaning community members who donate their time for the good of the Uptown area, were crucial in raising money for the park and getting it built. Some of the alliance’s members apparently thought the sculpture would improve the park. They have declined repeated requests for comment.
But some members of the general community have strongly objected to the sculpture being added at all, or at least in this manner. They say the addition will mar the aesthetic structure of the current park, which was designed by famed architect Robert Murase before his death in 2005.
Uptown Alliance Parks Committee member Flora Ninelles disliked the proposed changes so much she took to the group’s Facebook page to air her concerns. According to Ninelles, installing a boulder on the edge of the park would involve sawing through its aesthetically pleasing boardwalk.
“Counterbalance Park is about to be vandalized, and not by skateboarder or graffiti vandals, but by the people we would think would be acting as its conservancy, the Uptown Alliance parks committee,” Ninelles wrote on the website.
Architect Mark Hinshaw, who writes for the online newspaper “Crosscut,” wrote recently that there is no place in the park where the boulders will look appropriate and that they corrupt architect Murase’s vision.
Hinshaw, who had worked with Murase, wrote that the architect had originally intended to develop a “sculpted arrangement of stone over which water would cascade.” But the park’s budget couldn’t afford the installation.
Now, three years after the park’s completion, Hinshaw is among those angered by the idea that instead of trying to honor Murase’s intent, members of the Uptown Alliance went forward with commissioning and fabricating the five sculpted rocks of different sizes. He describes the rocks as, “some as tall as a person, others smaller and carved in dish shapes to contain water. The two tall pieces had text incised into them, one naming the donor.”
“Several things are going on here that are quite dismaying,” Hinshaw wrote in “Crosscut” on April 4. “First, the work of a renowned landscape architect has been altered without any review by designated bodies that normally approve of public design in the city.”
Hinshaw wrote that, usually, there is a very careful process and method for adding elements to a park. He maintained that “any number of artistic works might have complimented the park, but, instead, he described the stone slabs that are to be added to the park as “awkward, clunky and crude.”
Caught in the middle of all this is the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.
Spokeswoman Potter said that Parks officials expected the Uptown Alliance to come back to them with more extensive drawings so that a complete idea of how the sculpture would look could be discussed. Potter said no final drawings of the project were shown to Parks officials. They also never had an extensive conversation about where the rock would come from, what exactly would it look like and other elements of the installation. Instead, Alliance members went ahead and spent the money to buy the rock shapes.
“We are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak,” Potter said. “We had approved the concept of the stones, but we hadn’t approved of buying them. We had expected a lot more discussion and documentation before a final decision was made.”
Potter said Hinshaw had criticized the Parks Department for not having the right policies in place. She said the policies are there, but the department didn’t follow them as well as they should have.
“This will be a learning experience for everyone,” Potter said.
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