Story Updated: Jan 19, 2007 at 2:34 PM PST
By Associated Press
SEATTLE (AP) - The Seattle Art Museum opens its Olympic Sculpture Park on the downtown waterfront Saturday, bringing a free cultural experience to local residents and a new attraction for the city's many visitors.
"I like to think of Seattle as a place that is very open - a place that encourages innovation and
creativity, and I think the park has that feeling to it," said museum director Mimi Gates. "It's a park like no other."
The 9-acre park stretches down a hillside between a pavilion a few blocks from the Space Needle and a newly re-created beach on Puget Sound.
A 2,500-foot path zigzags over a four-lane road and railroad tracks, taking visitors past 22
contemporary sculptures. There's not a single general-on-a-horse among them.
The biggest is "Wake" by Richard Serra - five rust-colored steel slabs in 14-foot high curves that make people standing next to them feel as if they fell overboard.
The 39-foot-tall "Eagle" by Alexander Calder perches on a prominent spot in the middle of the park on reddish-orange scythe-like legs that cut through the gray of a winter day.
People driving by can look out their window and see the 19-foot tall "Typewriter Eraser, Scale X," by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Drivers might wonder, what next - a giant bottle of Wite-Out?
The art competes with views of green-and-white ferries crossing Elliott Bay, the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains and Mount Rainier looming over downtown skyscrapers.
Museum director Gates says putting a bit of the natural environment back in the city was one of the park's goals. She says the grass and trees that surround the sculptures create an oasis of calm even as trucks rumble past on Elliott Avenue and freight trains blow their whistles on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks.
"I think it says that Seattle is a forward-looking place ... a place that is going to incorporate the
environment into the heart of the city," Gates said. "It's a marriage of art and ecology."
The city can thank the museum for turning an eyesore into a tourist attraction. The site had been a tank farm where fuel was stored and transferred - not very cleanly. After the facility closed in 1975 the soil was contaminated and the cleanup took years in which passers-by saw only ugly empty lots. A fresh cap of soil, concrete ramps and bridges have transformed the site into an art pedestal.
The park demonstrates the effect of Microsoft money on the city. Only about a fourth of the $85 came from taxpayers. Private donors - many with Microsoft connections - made the park and the display of some of the major works possible.
Former Microsoft president John Shirley and his wife Mary gave a $20 million endowment that allows the park to open to the public free of charge.
Some money also came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.
Mimi Gates is married to Bill Gates Senior, father of the billionaire Microsoft co-founder.
A fountain at the park, "Father and Son" by Louise Bourgeois, is a story in itself. It was commissioned with a $1 million bequest from Stu Smailes, a retired Safeco computer analyst who died in 2002. He stipulated that it be spent on realistic nude male figures. The life-size figures of a father and son will be cloaked in waters that rise and fall, giving the figures only a glimpse of each other.
