Chief Seattle stands alone with his right arm raised in greeting toward an interrupted view of Puget Sound, a pod of orca whales frolicking on the walls of the nearby La Quinta Inn. It's an easy pose. Friendly. One he's been locked into for nearly a century in Tilikum Place, a small juncture of land three blocks north of the Space Needle where the land claims of Seattle pioneers once intersected. Beneath his bronzed feet is an awkwardly forthright plaque: "Chief of the Suquamish/Firm Friend of the Whites/For Whom the City of Seattle Was Named."

It was exactly 100 years ago when this sculpture was commissioned, and it was Seattle's first commissioned piece of public art. The city was preparing to host the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which aimed to raise jazz hands and public interest for the Northwest and its undeveloped suburb, Alaska. In 1909, the year of the Exposition, jazz hands consisted of agricultural and manufacturing exhibits, an elephant made out of nuts, Japanese teahouses, Prince Albert the Educated Horse, and Seattle's first stab at public art, in the form of memorial statuary.

In the early 1900s, before sculpture could be anything and mean anything, statuary was most common, and a form of public honor. Subjects were civic icons put on pedestals and preserved for posterity. They became historical markers forever tied to history and geography. They were cast without lifespan.

Since then, public sculpture has wandered from monumental figuration to monumental abstraction to site-specific integration. Seattle Art Museum's new Olympic Sculpture Park has only one work of art with human figures: Louise Bourgeois's fountain Father and Son, completed on March 9. But the park brings reinvigorated attention to public art, to its past, present, and future. The question arises: What purpose does century-old memorial statuary fulfill to a contemporary public audience?

Because of Chief Seattle's diva-ish sculptor—James A. Wehn, who martyred a plaster model in Elliott Bay rather than relinquishing it to a local casting firm he considered amateurish—Chief Seattle was not the first completed public sculpture in the city. In its place when the exposition opened on June 1, 1909, was a bald and frothily bearded bust towering 13 feet tall of James J. Hill, reminding visitors of who had brought the Great Northern Railroad to Seattle. Nearby, John H. McGraw, remembered as governor and cheerleader for the Lake Washington Ship Canal, posed 19 feet in the air with legs braced. Edvard Grieg, George Washington, and William H. Seward also made appearances on lofty pedestals around this time. Together, they signaled that, 58 years after the town's foundation in 1851, a half century after Chief Seattle got firm and friendly with the whites, Seattle had an art scene—or at least some art.

The people rejoiced. Statues clashed with conifers for skyline domination. Towering pedestals were backdrops for tourist portraits. "It was a banner year for public art," recounts the 1992 UW Press book Art in Seattle's Public Places.

Which is nice to hear. Without their plaques I'd have no idea who the hell half of these statues commemorated. Most people would need a ladder to know and a degree in history to care.

On a cloudy Thursday afternoon I stare up at the head of Norwegian composer Grieg as he squats on a 13-foot pedestal at UW. His thick bronze mustache and foot-tall windswept pompadour are oddly aged by indiscriminate bombs of bird shit. A few pedestrians glance up to see if I'm staring at something interesting—perhaps a jumper?—and keep walking. The thought strikes me that someone could replace Seattle's original statuary with bronzed pedophiles and no one would notice.

Beneath the feet of onetime Secretary of State Seward in Volunteer Park is chiseled the phrase "Let's make the treaty tonight." The statue is full of energy; Seward is crisply bow-tied and appears to be on the brink of stepping off the edge of his 10-foot pedestal. His coat is flapping in a breeze strong enough to ruffle bronze. Seattle businessmen in 1909 decided to honor him with a statue and a dedicated park, due to his role in the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia. While Seward Park was being completed, the statue stood in Volunteer Park—supposedly temporarily. Nearly a century later, Seward Park still lacks its masthead, and Seward stands in the wrong place.

"Statues are not lost or forgotten about," said Cath Brunner, director of public art at 4Culture, the King County arts agency. "They become the fabric of the city. They become so identified with a certain location that they're virtually inseparable."

I don't disagree. But Seward's abandonment in Volunteer Park creates a break in its meaning, a tension between statue and location. The intended relationship is unfulfilled. Instead of simply commemorating Seward's achievements, his statue is also a testament to stranded sculpture.

Cityscapes change all the time; abandoned buildings are often razed. But what becomes of forgotten memorials? Should they be shuffled to a statuary graveyard? Or to an actual graveyard, as was Seattle's contentious World War I memorial American Doughboy Bringing Home Victory. Before his dedication in 1932, Doughboy was criticized by navy veterans for resembling an army soldier. He was publicly condemned for the grin on his face and German helmets slung around his neck like booty scavenged from the dead. Ultimately, he was banished to behind the opera house in Seattle Center, only to be relocated to Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Evergreen-Washelli in the late 1990s.

One of the issues with Doughboy was his failure to represent the fabled everyman. The public appetite had evolved from commemorative heroic statuary to anonymous figures, ultimately resulting in sculptures like Richard Beyer's 1979 cast-aluminum installation in Fremont, People Waiting for the Interurban. In it, five regular folks wait for a bus with one "freeloader," depicted as a sneaky dog with human features.

It's difficult to commission realistic figurative sculpture today, said 4Culture's Brunner. "We have to address questions like, how does this represent everybody? If it's a male form, we're leaving out women, or if it's Caucasian... We're always excluding someone."

"Plus," Brunner said, "a lot of people are offended by the human form—breasts and genitalia." An early design drawing of Bourgeois's Father and Son at the sculpture park drew protests against the undraped penises.

I asked Brunner who she thought would make a good commemorative statue now. "That's a great question," she said. "Maybe Jimi Hendrix?"

Hendrix already has one, from 1997, that's a landmark on Broadway. It was commissioned privately by AEI Music founder Michael Malone (and its placement on Capitol Hill, instead of in the neighboring Central District where Hendrix grew up, makes him more a commandeered corporate mascot than a site-appropriate commemoration).

Brunner couldn't think of another statue-ready Seattleite, offhand.

Maybe commemorative statuary is old-fashioned, but it's also contemporary in its attempt to relate to its audience and its site. The old statuary was crystalline in its deliberateness, symbolically tidy but mortal—one man, one action, one location, and one slogan, all balanced up on a pedestal as a widely understood but time-sensitive civic statement.

I'm not a native of Seattle, so many time-sensitive civic statements are lost on me. I never "got" grunge—I was nine. I missed the riots. And once I move d here for college, it took me six years of jogging by Seward to stop and introduce myself. Almost immediately I felt embarrassed at my ignorance. And then annoyed—I wanted Seattle's history to begin with me. I wanted statues of Octavia Butler, Bill Boeing, Bill Gates—names I was familiar with. Names I didn't need a fourth-grade Washington history education to understand. I started researching Seattle's first statuary in part to educate myself, to idly explore how these dated artworks still interacted with the community—and to see whether they could be removed.

Communist hero Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, subject of Seattle's largest and most famous statue, takes a step forward on North 36th Street as if to stride through the heart of Fremont's shopping strip. His meaning has gone through revolutions of its own—from state hero to pariah to toothless bit of kitsch. The 16-foot memorial, made in 1988, was rescued from a Slovakian dump after the Soviet Union's collapse by a lone Issaquah resident who died in a car crash shortly after bringing Lenin over, in 1994. The "alternative" Fremont neighborhood adopted the statue as a symbol in 1995. According to the plaque, Lenin is for sale, for $250,000.

Like Lenin, Seattle's early statuary was cast in celebration by citizens who wanted to memorialize their heroes. When I came upon them, our relationship stemmed from a place of maximum alienation: I was an outsider vaguely condemning a history I had no ties to. While researching ways to further disconnect myself from statues, the opposite happened. I became invested in the damned things. I want to give them a happy ending—starting by shipping Lenin to Cuba?—where their histories might not be ignored.

editor@thestranger.com