PORT TOWNSEND — The story of the Jackson Bequest is nearing what could be its final chapter.
The Port Townsend Arts Commission voted 7-2 in favor of recommending the removal of the waterfront artwork — known more commonly as the Tidal Clock — at a special public hearing on Thursday night.
Only three people spoke at the hearing, and most said they understood why the sculpture was being removed.
“What we have here was a good idea,” said Ray Greer, a Port Townsend resident.
“It almost works, but it’s been altered since the beginning, and it just doesn’t work.”
The clock was envisioned as a community gathering place when it was created in 1987 with a gift of $200,000 from Ruth Seavey Jackson, a member of a Port Townsend family with a seafaring tradition, who wanted a piece of community art created to celebrate the waterfront.
The clock was supposed to collect marine life in a series of graduate steps inside the bowl.
Instead it collects a menagerie of debris from plastic bags to telephone pole sized logs as waves from Port Townsend Bay crash against the rocks at the entrance.
The Tidal Park area, which includes the Tidal Clock, Wave Viewing Gallery and a section of land behind the police station, contains dumpsters and refuse.
The recommendation from the Arts Commission will be considered by the City Council for a final decision on the fate of the Tidal Clock.
City Planner Rick Sepler said the council will hold a public hearing before taking a vote.
The hearing had not been set as of Friday.
Nora Porter, who is opposed to removing the clock from the waterfront, said she planned to return to council chambers for that hearing.
Porter said she was displeased with the decision to remove the clock as she felt the city has undermined the artists’ intentions from the beginning.
Fix the clock
“We have the money to destroy it [the clock], but not the money to fix it and get it right,” she said.
“I think we will be the laughingstock of the area, and the city will have a black eye if this happens.
“It’s one thing when people vandalize the poetry at Fort Worden,” referring to the poetry on pillars at Memory’s Vault “or throw beer bottles . . . at the sculptures along F Street, and it is another thing entirely when public officials attack the artists and their work.”
The Arts Commission discussion before the vote lasted almost three hours.
Commission member Frank Vane, who voted against the recommendation, went as far as requesting that the proceedings be stopped on grounds that the public was not sufficiently informed about the situation.
The other dissenting vote on the commission came from Linda Okazaki, who compared the destruction and alteration of the clock to that of “cutting an artist’s painting in half and displaying it in the lobby of City Hall.”
Stan Rubin, the chairman of the commission, said the decision made at the meeting were difficult.
“We take this seriously,” Rubin said.
“This has not been a secret meeting, this has been made public and it is a difficult decision.
“But something has to be done.”
City plans
The city has plans to fill the clock with concrete and create a stage with a circular seating area around it.
“It’s a great public space, and it’s time for the community to retake that place on the water,” Sepler said.
“We can have concerts there, art shows, performances. We would have a great facility to do stuff at right there on the water.”
Said City Manager David Timmons: “We’re not going overboard, just letting people enjoy going back there. It will be more of a usable space than just a hole.”
The San Francisco Bay-area artists who designed the Tidal Clock — and the rest of the Jackson Bequest — wrote a letter to the city earlier this month.
In the letter, Douglas Hollis and Charles Fahlen ask that the city remove their authorship from the modified version of the clock.
The letter reads: “In light of the apparent fact that the city, Art Commission, and ‘local community’ no longer feel obliged to fulfill a commitment to the integrity of our concept and design of the Tidal Clock, Wave Gazing Gallery and attendant landscaping as a sculpture and public amenity, we expect and insist that our authorship as the artists responsible for executing the Jackson Bequest is not associated or identified as an endorsement in any way with the ‘reshaping of this key waterfront area’ and the consequent destruction of the sculpture.”
Timmons responded with a letter agreeing with their request.
In May, the artists agreed with the idea of moving the wave gallery inland — and off the rotting pilings it now sits upon — and restoring it.
The wave viewing gallery has been partially shut down for almost a decade, because the pilings holding up the deck are structurally unsound.
Sepler, who has been working on correcting the problems with the Jackson Bequest since 1990, said that the original concept was never completed in accordance with the artists’ vision.
“Compromises were made in the construction,” Sepler said.
Sepler said he doesn’t blame the artists, or the contractors, or anyone in the city.
He sees it as a project that was doomed for several different reasons and now, regardless of how it got to where it is now, it needs to be fixed.
“The best solution we have is moving the wave gallery ashore and filling in the clock,” Sepler said.
Timmons agreed.
“We want to do right by the artists, but we also want to do right by the community.”
Timmons said the history of the clock might be retained through an etching in the area that explains the story of the Jackson Bequest.
“We can still tell the story of the tidal clock and can preserve the concept,” Timmons said.
“There is no way structurally to rehabilitate it to do what it was intended.”
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Reporter Erik Hidle can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at erik.hidle@peninsuladailynews.com.
