Danny Westneat is right on with his column about the worst bench in Seattle:
It doesn’t look like much. Just a two-level bench of fiberglass, with legs made from steel plumbing pipes. It was designed to evoke an era when labor halls and working stiffs ruled Seattle’s Belltown. The art bench juts slightly into the sidewalk along Second Avenue, intervening in the right-angle-orderliness of the urban grid. Its goal, says the city’s art Web site, is to “engage passers-by physically and mentally, as well as visually, by providing places to sit and think.”
Yeah, to help passers-by engage with a Mickey’s Big Mouth, maybe.
Even if the art itself isn’t to blame, what irks neighbors is that because it’s art, it can’t be moved without special permission from a city arts panel.
“We’ve been trying to get rid of it for eight years,” Markovich says. “But it’s part of this Belltown art theme, so the city won’t let it go.”
The theory was that art can help design away crime. Make a place interesting and vibrant, it will be safer. Only it turned out drug dealers and pimps appreciate art, too.
The artist, Kurt Kiefer, wrote on the city’s public-art Web site that he placed that bench and other objects on the Belltown sidewalk as a way to “remember the experiments and improvisations that … continue to define the Denny Regrade.”
Corsi says the city must end this art exhibit, or neighbors will do it for them.
“The bench is going to show up one morning on the mayor’s front lawn,” he said.
One day, that bench will disappear. And no one, and I mean no one, will be sorry that it’s gone. I walk by this bench every day, and it’s always a dump. Belltown has other “art” pieces, like the concrete rubble on 1st Avenue, that ought to get the heave-ho. But lets start with that bench.
City Hall needs to stop inflicting crappy public art on the public.
Ha! I’ve never noticed that before. It’s gotta be near Mama’s. I’ll have to look for it the next time I have lunch up there.
It’s at the bus stop across the street.
City Hall needs to stop inflicting crappy public art on the public
I don’t know why you’d think it’d stop after this many years…
Unfortunately, this bench has become a magnet for almost daily altercations. It should be moved to the viewpoint at 1st and Battery.
What? A lib that has a problem with the 1% for public arts? Wow, that is very non-liberal of you. I tell you, firefighters just love when we have to fight tooth and nail for flash hoods or other safety equipment, but the city can find money for public art at Fire Stations and schools.
jennifer dunn has died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. it’s in the seatimes and pi. could some esteemed commenter fill us wa relocatees in on jennifer’s connections to dunn lumber? i heard that’s the dunn but nothing online seems to mention anything about her mariiage(s) before keith thomson circa 2004 when she retired from her fole as a shrub pioneer to immediately lobby tom delay and her crony pals. i’m thinking roger rabbit has lots of keystrokes on this. thanks.
@6 Actually, I don’t. Jennifer’s official bios simply talk about her career. She got her start as a midlevel bureaucrat in the county assessments department. (I got my start as a low level bureaucrat in state government; she became a congresswoman, and I became a retiree.) She seems to have gone to some lengths to conceal her personal life. Maybe she didn’t have one. Maybe she’s a cyborg. Maybe she came from Uranus. Maybe that’s why all those UFOs were flying around Mt. Rainier back in ’41. Maybe her battery gave out. Hell, I don’t know anything about her, except that she was a Republican.
Nothing says Seattle quite like a beautiful orange sunset making the Olympics glow across a painfully beautiful deep blue Elliot Bay like having a big fucking ugly eraser in the foreground.