Garden wall collapses at Mattress Factory museum
If a brick garden wall falls on the North Side, does it matter?
Yes, especially when that garden wall is part of an outdoor art installation called the Winifred Lutz Garden at the Mattress Factory contemporary art museum.
The wall collapsed after rain fell Tuesday, said Mandy Wilson, a museum spokeswoman.
On Wednesday, orange fencing was erected around the Winifred Lutz Garden, located at 500 Sampsonia Way.
In 1993, Ms. Lutz, a Philadelphia artist, created the garden to look like an urban ruin.
In 2001, Pittsburgh PostGazette art critic Mary
Thomas called the Winifred Lutz Garden “a tactile feast of craggy stone, brick patterns, nubs of succulents, wisps of grasses and gurgling running water . ... No one who experiences it could deny it is a garden.”
When the wall collapsed, bricks fell toward the museum, not onto the street.
In 2017, Ms. Wilson said, the museum received a grant from the state Department of Community and Economic Development and was reimbursed for $174,391. The funds were used to repair the garden and adjacent outdoor spaces.
“While repairs were made to the wall, the project did not include a full-scale renovation of the garden wall,” Ms. Wilson said in a written statement.
Michael Olijnyk, the museum’s former executive director, lives in the museum in a two-story condominium on the building’s top two floors. He recalled that the work done in 2017 included repairs to plumbing that recirculates water through the garden.
The contractor hired for the job, PJ Dick, spent six weeks on the site and finished in 2018, Mr. Olijnyk said.
Ms. Lutz returned to Pittsburgh in 2001 to evaluate the garden’s condition. By then, lichens and moss had grown onto a group of boulders, but invasive weeds had choked out the prairie and blue-eyed grasses she had planted.