And yet, despite all this engagement with our physical city, there is an important question that has so far gone unanswered: Will we be stuck with that bronze teddy bear outside FAO Schwarz when the store closes?
The bear appeared when the toy-store chain opened a Seattle branch in 1995, back when the push was on to turn downtown into a huge, open-air mall (the days, you recall, when mainstream media decided that the arrival of PlanetHollywood and Niketown indicated that Seattle had finally arrived). In city government, there seems to be a bit of amnesia about who, in the first place, approved the bear, which takes up an enormous patch of sidewalk in a busy area, but almost everyone agrees the decision was political. John Zavis, of the Seattle Department of Transportation, writes right-of-way permits and remembers thinking that the statue took up too much space, but he was told to write the permit, and he did.
The three-ton bear, sitting with his stack of alphabet blocks (lettered, of course, not with A, B, or C, but F, A, and O), was designed by Massachusetts artist Robert Shure; many of the stores have bear statues, of this design or others, some plated in gold leaf. Ours is on its way to becoming a "beloved" landmark, the process by which something, whether hated or appreciated, is absorbed into the landscape. It happened with Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man, which everyone seemed to despise when it was installed in 1992, and also with the enormous salvaged Lenin statue in Fremont. Jean Godden, in a 2000 Seattle Times column about Seattle meeting places, christened the street corner "Teddy Bear Junction." Children love to be photographed in front of it; WTO protesters in 1999 loved to climb up it in order to get a better view of the action.
People tend to get bossy about beloved things, which is why I think a preemptive strike is necessary to keep FAO Schwarz from abandoning the bear here forever. It's possible the company will take it with them (possibly to sell against the bankrupt company's debts), or that the next tenant of that space--awkwardly carved out of an office-building lobby--will want it, and be willing to pay the upkeep. For now, no one knows; FAO Schwarz, both the local store and the headquarters in Pennsylvania, is not giving any interviews about anything at this time.
There's an inscription on the back of the bear that declares the statue a gift to the children of Seattle from FAO Schwarz, which frankly sounds a lot like it's being unloaded on the city. But does the city want it? According to Barbara Goldstein, program director for public art at the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, it wouldn't make it past the Seattle Arts Commission's gift review policy. "It's not art," Goldstein said quite firmly. The mayor could intervene and accept it, although there are no current plans for him to do so.
Many people, it must be said, including art people and including me, hate the bear. It's a banally hideous thing, yet another cute and thoughtless abomination slid in under the public's consciousness as "art," when it's nothing of the kind. It's advertising that fancies itself art, with a set of discreet plaques at the statue's base asking people not to climb on the "artwork" (quotation marks theirs). Never mind, apparently, that it's a gift no one asked for, one with a not terribly subtle agenda; rope in the kids with the "beloved" statue not 20 feet away from the retail paradise.
So children love the bear. Fine. Does that mean we have to keep it? I grew up climbing on the statues of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen in New York's Central Park, but there was no misunderstanding about what they were. They were not advertisements, and no one was claiming they were art. Must we turn the city into a playground? Must our children equate symbols of a bankrupt megacorporation with public art? Must we, again and again and again, opt for the ugly and childish instead of the fine and interesting?
No, we mustn't. Bye bye FAO Schwarz. Take the bear with you.
