| Salt Lake City |
 |
 |
| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
 |
| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
|
| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
|
| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
|
| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
|
| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
|
| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
|
| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
|
| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
|
| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
Rocky cool to Games fountain
Mayor not sure downtown is the best spot
By Diane Urbani
Deseret News staff writer
Robert L. Rice, of Rice-Eccles Stadium and European Health Spas fame, is prepared to give. But Salt Lake City isn't quite ready to take.
Rice and business partner Kenneth Melby want to donate a half-million-dollar Olympic legacy fountain "to make downtown more attractive," as the 72-year-old Rice says.
Well, everybody wants to help downtown — but some city leaders are hesitating at the design of the fountain, conceived by the Salt Lake sculptor Saraj.
"There are five balls, propelled by water, symbolizing the Olympic rings," Rice began. "The water keeps them moving . . . it is quite different. It would be more contemporary" than other examples of public art around Salt Lake City.
"It's very interesting" is Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson's response. Rice wrote to the mayor last summer, offering the fountain to the city.
The new Library Square, east of the City-County Building, could be the place, Rice wrote, "for such an exciting, beautiful and permanent work of art . . . (it) would foster a great gathering spot for the community."
This sounds like exactly what the mayor and his crew have ordered for the downtown area — public art to draw people in. Mary Kay Lazarus, the marketing maven who's talked about Paris' Pompidou Center as an inspiration for a revived downtown Salt Lake City, refers to the street musicians and sidewalk artists who frequent that Parisian square. There's also a fountain there — a weird, colorful one with spinning plaster lips and hoses that spray water at odd times.
But when faced with a similarly vivid fountain for his city center, Anderson isn't plunging in. He has his own ideas about where to place which Olympic legacy piece. In conversations now at an impasse, the mayor has told Rice and Melby that he'd rather see their fountain outside the Salt Lake City Sports Complex near the University of Utah.
Both he and his deputy mayor, Rocky Fluhart, pause before they say the Saraj fountain might not fit into Library Square. "It would be marvelous up at the Sports Complex," Fluhart says. "It probably wouldn't be appropriate for the library block."
But Rice says the mayor's idea of placing the fountain on a hill outside the Sports Complex "isn't suitable" either. "You don't want to stick something like this up on a hill, where occasionally a car drives by," he says. "This needs people walking up to it, looking at it, and saying, 'boy.' "
The mayor says "boy" to Rice's generosity — but again, suggests a different location. The large Rice-Melby fountain could be built at Pioneer Park, where he'd also like to see a spacious ice-skating rink ringed by flags.
"I can't see, with the way Pioneer Park is now, that that would be reasonable," Rice says of placing his fountain there. And Anderson is only in the talking stages of a Pioneer Park overhaul. While he's at it, the mayor also wants to see a 2002 Winter Games museum constructed, preferably at the City-County Building. Then he has the Games-themed paintings done by Peter Max: one an assemblage of children's art from the Olympic torch route across the United States, the other a colorful portrayal of Anderson. Those might go into the new Main Library, the mayor says.
Talk is cheap, but Olympic legacy art and other park improvements not so. It's still unclear where funding will come from for the mayor's plan to landscape the four-acre park on Library Square.
Problems, or at least potential ones, spring from Salt Lake fountains. The city had to shut off the Seven Canyons water feature at Liberty Park when its bacterial content rose above safe levels. A $150,000 filtration system was needed; last summer a donor was found and installation begun, but the fountain hasn't reopened. The target date is May 1, according to city Public Services spokeswoman Nikki Bown.
Then there's the dancing water at The Gateway. Even in frigid temperatures, Games-goers played in the Olympic Legacy Plaza fountain. Come summer, "the thing we're most nervous about is people keeping their clothes on," said Jake Boyer, developer of The Gateway. "If kids were running through it when it was 25 degrees out, you know, high school kids just showing off," what could be in store in 95-degree heat this July? "We may have to put up some modesty signs," Boyer said.
E-MAIL: durbani@desnews.com
|
|
April 2, 2002
|
