Construction debacle left the park muddy and mostly shuttered for 18 months
On a cold morning last week, Michael Bevis walked quickly past Armstrong Park, his jacket collar pulled up to keep warm. But he stopped for a few minutes at the Dumaine Street gate, one of the few open entrances for the long-shuttered park.
There, on the edge of the lagoon, as Bevis watched, electricians installed in-ground lights next to a massive blue concrete sculpture. A representation of the city's old French Opera House, it was the last of six new works to be installed in the park's sculpture garden before a grand reopening Friday at 11 a.m. with music by the Treme Brass Band, whose bass drummer, Uncle Lionel Batiste, grew up in a house demolished a half-century ago to make room for the park.
The timing is in keeping with a promise to reopen the park this year made by Mayor Mitch Landrieu in his State of the City address in April, said mayoral spokesman Ryan Berni.
Under Mayor Ray Nagin, the city spent $1.2 million from the Edward Wisner Donation Trust to commission six sculptures representing cultural icons of New Orleans. The park's venerable Louis Armstrong statue was also elevated to a better position, overlooking the fountain in front of the Mahalia Jackson Theater. Contractors also reinstalled and relighted a bust of jazz reedman Sidney Bechet.
Initially, critics grumbled that Nagin sidestepped the typical committees charged with making sure the six new sculptures can stand the test of time.
Those early complaints have since been dwarfed by a construction debacle that left the park muddy and mostly shuttered for 18 months.
Just before Nagin left office in May 2010, crews used spotlights to extend workdays and labored feverishly to complete what the administration dubbed the "Roots of Music Cultural Sculpture Garden."
"You're going to be blown away," Nagin promised just before the unveiling, in his final days of office.
But within days of Nagin's parting soiree, concrete on the park's newly laid grand promenade had begun to crack.
It was the first of what became an extensive catalog of shoddy work done by contractor A.M.E. Disaster Recovery Services: Concrete poured badly, then ripped out, not once but several times. Bobcat drivers who careened wildly around the park, damaging curbing, gates and irrigation pipes and toppling light poles and palm trees. The park's namesake bronze statue was stretched to the point that Armstrong's left shoe nearly separated from its base.
Although some say Nagin has been unfairly vilified for a contractor's mistakes, others, including Landrieu, have cited the troubled project as an example of Nagin's larger failures. "This project is just another example of a deal the Nagin administration improperly executed," Landrieu said in July 2010, two months after taking office, as he ordered A.M.E. to stop work.
While the city couldn't immediately provide the costs for damages caused by A.M.E., observers say the missteps likely totaled a few million dollars, nearly as much as the $2.6 million contract that the Nagin administration signed with A.M.E. to complete that phase of the park's renovation.
The surety bond paid for all of the repairs, Berni said.
Worse than the construction miscues, in some people's estimation, was that most of Armstrong Park had to remain closed while the city negotiated with A.M.E. and its insurer about how to undo the damage. After Landrieu ordered A.M.E. to stop work in the summer 2010, the city also cut off payments for the project, causing hardship for small subcontractors that had satisfactorily completed work for A.M.E. but couldn't be paid until the city finally agreed in April to settle with A.M.E.
Last week, almost as soon as Steve Kline's sculpture, an homage to New Orleans' opera heritage, was in place, it drew harsh reviews from various observers, led by Friends of Armstrong Park head Leo Watermeier, who sent an email blast decrying the work as "ugly, inappropriate and a blight on our beautiful park."
As Bevis passed the park, he sized up the sculpture and was less quick to criticize.
"It makes a certain familial connection," said Bevis, who has a minor in contemporary art. He noted the sculpture's steps and made linkages with photos he had seen of the opera house, which burned to the ground in 1919.
Then Bevis, 40, took another look and shook his head. "It's the color that's throwing me off," he said, noting that he couldn't quite connect the revered, historic opera house with "light powder blue."
Exactly right, laughed sculptor Kline, 58. The paint, which Kline calls "swimming-pool blue," is merely a primer for the concrete and will be covered entirely with square glass tiles, Kline said, as he labored in the park with a crew of workers to install the partly iridescent tiles onto the concrete. In the midst of the tiles in four different places are laser-etched photographs of the opera house, which stood at Bourbon and Toulouse streets and was designed by James Gallier, the architect for Gallier Hall.
Reached earlier this week, Watermeier agreed that the piece "definitely looks better with the mosaics."
As the only abstract artist of the bunch, Kline had anticipated some confusion. "I talked with Mayor Nagin at the time and warned him that I wouldn't be producing a figurative sculpture for him," he said.
The city paid $200,000 to Kline for his work and $1 million for the other representational works: $400,000 to Sheleen Jones-Adenle for Mardi Gras Indian Chief Tootie Montana and a brass band; $180,000 to Jones-Adenle's husband, Adewale Adenle, for Congo Square; $180,000 to Kimberly Dummons for her likeness of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and, for gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, $250,000 to Elizabeth Catlett, who created the park's longtime Louis Armstrong statue 50 years ago.
To understand more about opera in the city, Kline met with Robert Lyall, general director of the New Orleans Opera.
Lyall sees "more opera than opera house" in the sculpture. Its massiveness could be "a metaphorical representation of the importance of opera in 19th-century New Orleans," the first city in North American to present opera, Lyall said.
Kline agreed that his work is about the grandiose art of opera. The squiggly metal line that floats above a lower wall mimics a sound wave, or a voice. The large etched stainless-steel spheres standing on steps and hiding behind one wall are about drama -- how did they get there, will they move? The tiles on the taller wall are predominately blue on one side and red on the other, like a stage set.
As he worked, Kline spoke with several foreign tourists who had hoped to visit the Armstrong statue but found a chain-link construction fence blocking them.
As the park gets ready to fully reopen, the permanent iron fences surrounding the park have sparked a renewed discussion, because they too can restrict access, to standard park hours.
A group that calls itself People United for Armstrong Park has surveyed neighbors about what is considered the "divisive" issue, said group leader Ben Harwood. Most on the French Quarter side of the park favor keeping at least the park's front fence, Harwood said at a press conference in August, while those on the Treme side would rather see the fence removed. Because the park is sometimes perceived as dangerous, taking down the fences could open it to the neighborhood and could conceivably make it safer, he said.
Standing in the park on a stunning fall day earlier this week, Kline couldn't help but imagine what the green space would feel like once the park is once again open and buzzing with visitors. Maybe in future days, he said, his French Opera House piece will serve as a backdrop for one-act plays, puppet shows or poetry readings.
"It's in a public setting," Kline said. Once the park is opened, he said, the fate of his work, like the rest of the park, rests in the hands of the public.
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Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3396.