Pia K. Hansen: It’s a shame to barricade public art

Dennis Hession was president of the City Council and Jim West was mayor in September 2005, when Spokanites and their dehydrated kids gathered for the Rotary Riverfront Fountain’s ribbon-cutting in Riverfront Park.

It’s beautiful, people said.

It’s destined to become an icon, they said.

Eeeee! shrieked the kids and ran through the water as fast as they could.The fountain, designed by Harold Balazs with a sticker price of $1.4 million funded by Rotary Club 21 and a voter-approved bond issue, was finally going at full blast.

I was especially happy to see an interactive fountain – a water feature designed to get you wet, a place your kids could run through and you could push your friends into.

So imagine my surprise when I found the fountain surrounded by a fence Monday morning.

Perhaps I’m blind, but I hadn’t noticed that fence before and the sight of the corralled fountain stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was not a pretty fence. It was made of galvanized steel crowd-control panels, like you’d see at a rock concert, which surrounded the fountain except for a few openings you could walk through.

The fence was outfitted with signs reading: “Fountain use area, no vehicles please.”

I beg your pardon? People drive into the fountain?

Please don’t tell me people have been washing their pickup trucks in this sculpture.

I’ve heard jokes about the fountain being the biggest and most expensive shower for homeless people in the country – but that someone would use it as a carwash I just couldn’t believe.

Thankfully, it turned out I was wrong.

“No, no, people are not washing their cars there,” said Nancy Goodspeed, spokeswoman for the Spokane Parks and Recreation Department. “Here’s the deal: We have big rocks there that have been drilled into with lights and water, and they get hit by vehicles. Every time one of them goes out, it is $2,000.” Some of these nifty things are set into the pavement, where they get run over.

But who drives there?

“Well, media thinks nothing of driving their big trucks up over the curb and into the park that way,” Goodspeed said. Point well taken, but I travel with a notepad so I don’t think we can blame this ugly fence on the print media. “Park vehicles are there, vendors and their vehicles are there, for all types of events,” said Goodspeed. Think Hoopfest, Bloomsday, Fourth of July – you get the drift.

“Any time we set up for an event, we put up the fence,” said Goodspeed. “We put it up during move in and move out of the park.”

But it’s such an ugly fence. I mean, the aesthetics of the whole area are just ruined.

“The fence is not pretty at all, you are right,” Goodspeed said, “but if it saves one life it would be worth it.”

Saves a life? Are people drowning in the fountain?

“No, parents have been really good about watching the kids there,” Goodspeed said. “But children playing in and around the water could get hit by trucks, coming and going from the park. Everything else is secondary to a safety barrier between vehicles and little kids.”

The portable fence came up for the first time at Hoopfest last year. It was up for Bloomsday. It will be up again this weekend for the Lilac Festival, Goodspeed said.

I guess I can live with an occasionally fenced-in fountain, though I’d prefer not to. I mean, it’s just ugly.

When I took a group of Ukrainian visitors on a walking tour downtown a couple of weeks ago, they loved the fountain. They took countless pictures of one another in front, behind, in the middle of and next to the fountain.

Somehow, that wouldn’t have been the same if the fence were up.