Belltown Messenger

On June 23rd, the Seattle Art Museum hosted the "Party in the Park" to celebrate the groundbreaking of the new Olympic Sculpture Park, scheduled to open next year. Standing in a windswept lot at the corner of Broad St. and Elliott Ave. with the sun beating down, I'm briefly troubled to notice that every step kicks up a cloud of dust. The lot is actually an environmental cleanup area. Back in 1910, Union Oil of California opened up a fuel facility on the site, which heavily contaminated the soil. Although cleanup occurred during the 1990s, it still strikes me as a concern.

Today, it's hard to imagine what the site will look like in only a year. In fact, you'd be tempted to imagine that the lot was the future site of a new big box store, given the countless Target logos (Target sponsored the event). Yuppies crowd into the beer garden, clutching over-priced microbrews as a desperation-coolant, given the utter lack of shade. In the center of the lot is a small raised area being used as an ad hoc dance floor while a Latin band, Yerbabuena, plays on stage. At one point, I literally run into Almost Live alum Liz Guppy, the event's MC.

But if SAM is to be believed, the site will one day be a centerpiece of the waterfront. The $85 million project will produce a Z-shaped garden, complete with sculptures, a cafe, gift store, interactive learning center, and a tiered series of gardens mimicking Northwest ecologies, from alpine forests to waterfront fish habitats. Weiss/Manfredi architects of New York, the much lauded team that designed the site, have characterized their project as "[A] continuous surface that unfolds as a landscape for art, wandering from the city across highway and rail lines to reach the water's edge. This new topography, sculpted to rise over the existing infrastructure, creates an uninterrupted landform for sculpture, offering settings to view the city and the Sound." SAM's press on the new garden is similarly enthusiastic. Celebrating the project for turning "a former industrial site into vibrant new green space for art and people," a recent SAM press release went on to claim, "The park will give visitors the opportunity to experience sculpture while enjoying the incredible views and beauty of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound." But the project has hardly been uncontroversial. First and foremost, it threatened the very existence of the waterfront streetcar at a time when the city was trying to create a larger streetcar system.

The George Benson Waterfront Streetcar line, so named for the former councilor who made it happen, started operating back in 1982. The streetcars themselves are antiques and as such have high-cost and labor-intensive maintenance requirements which were performed out of a storage facility on land at the future Olympic Sculpture Garden site. SAM planned to raze the structure, and King County Metro, which operates the line, failed to secure new quarters in a timely fashion. Eventually, an eleventh hour offer by the Port of Seattle saved the line, but that too was controversial. The costly line extension (an estimated $1,000 per foot) to run the streetcar further north to service the new Amgen campus was immediately attacked as another corporate handout.

Further, the fact that the Seattle Art Museum, of all organizations, has taken the lead in creating new waterfront development raises questions in itself. Although the park will feature some exciting works of art (including Alexander Calder's striking 1971 stabile sculpture "Wake," as well as pieces by artists like Richard Serra and Mark Di Suvero), the price tag is sufficiently high to beg the question of whether or not arts and culture funding ever in short supply couldn't have been spent on something other than a park.

As it happens, the sculpture park is one of several projects of SAM's "I am SAM" campaign, a large outreach program and fundraiser meant to make SAM more accessible to the city community. The sculpture park's purpose, then, seems to be the creation of open, public art spaces. (For one thing, unlike SAM, the park will be open to the public for free.) Other projects include a expansion of the downtown building to take up the entire block between Union and University Streets on First Ave. which will expand gallery space by 70 percent. Also, the Seattle Asian Art Museum is receiving a much needed series of repairs and renovations and will serve as a temporary exhibition space while the downtown location is closed for the expansion after January 5, 2006.

Still, as exciting as the entire affair is, the turn-out for the "Party in the Park" left this writer wondering whether expanding the museum's mandate to include urban parks might not be such a good thing. Surrounded by corporate sponsors' flags rippling in the wind, I wondered who, exactly, the park will serve. If the attendees were any indication, mostly disinterested middle-aged types. There seemed to be little attempt to reach out to the younger people (unless you count the small children amazed by the large whale skeleton on display from the Seattle Aquarium). The Bellevue Arts Museum recently reopened after a long renovation having abandoned its past ambitiousness and trumpeting itself as a center for exploring "art, craft and design." It's new logo even de-emphasizes its former association with contemporary art by adding a differently shaded letter "s" to "Arts." Hopefully, SAM will manage not to dilute its own mission as it takes on new projects.