A city returns to its center
“This sickness is not unto death.”
— John 11:4
The curse of “Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge” has been lifted from the intersection of Capitol and Main. Henry Moore sculpted the original version in 1961. He called it “Winged Figure.” The shape at the top was meant to look like the breastbone of a bird.
Moore might have been inspired by a poem he illustrated for Edward Sackville-West, first cousin of Vita. Sackville-West said that the hero of his poem had “something of a mysterious timelessness, the knife edge balance between being and not being, which only the poetic imagination seems able to achieve.”
Little Rock’s Metrocentre Commission bought “Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge” in 1978 and placed the 1,200-pound bronze sculpture in the center of the intersection of Capitol and Main, which had been closed to vehicular traffic as part of a plan to establish a downtown pedestrian mall to compete with the new shopping malls on the western edge of town. The old commercial center of the capital city of Arkansas was, in terms of day-to-day commerce, on the knife-edge balance between being and not being.
The Metrocentre Commission appointed a special committee to select the pedestrian mall’s signature work of public art: James Dyke, Townsend Wolfe, Mrs. Beadle Moore, Dr. Virginia P. Rembert, Alvin Allen, Miss Anne Bartley, Hugh B. Patterson Jr., William B. Worthen Jr., and P.A. “Les” Hollingsworth.
Their charge, according to their written report, was “to select a major work of aesthetic significance that would be a source of pride to the entire community.” The committee’s original choice, a “tall, slender, metal sculpture” called “centrenym” was, according to the Arkansas Gazette, met with public outcry.
Noland Blass, chief architect of the pedestrian mall project, assured James Dyke that a work by Henry Moore would be a safe bet: “In the case of Henry Moore, there is no doubt that he is outstanding, and there would never be any question of any public outcry at a selection of one of his pieces.”
Dyke, Wolfe, and Rembert flew to England and met with Moore. The sculpture was one of six cast in 1976 after the 1961 original; its siblings landed in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, and North Carolina; a replica or smaller iteration appears in the high school library setting in John Hughes’ 1985 movie “The Breakfast Club.”
The $195,000 sculpture was paid for by assessments on property within the Metrocentre Improvement District, bounded on the north and south by Markham and Ninth streets, on the west and east by Broadway and Scott.
The editorial page of the Pine Bluff Commercial called it “evocative, powerful, a Presence.” If he were still alive, I would ask the old editor what he meant by that; I do recall his saying that he liked it best in its original location, where the knife edge seemed to illustrate the severance of the interests of the people from those of their elected representatives at the Capitol, visible a mile to the west.
The statement wasn’t as powerful after 1999, when the pedestrian area reopened to cars and the sculpture was moved off to the side.
“Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge” now resides at the northern entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts. It gets a lot of attention, at least in the modern way of attention: It provides the subject or the background for a lot of photos. Surely it’s happier now.
Did “Knife Edge” really bring a curse to the intersection that should be the center of commerce in Little Rock? Of course not, but it’s a fine emblem of the hubris of top-down Urban Planning, which like so much cutting-edge, scientifically informed planning can have the unintended consequence of sterility. And sterility is how neighborhoods and whole cities die off completely, not decay.
Cities, after all, are organic. They change. They can withstand cycles of renewal and decay.
And renewal: On Tuesday, Attorney General Tim Griffin announced the renovation of the Boyle Building at the southwest corner of Capitol and Main. George Mann designed the building, which at 11 stories was Little Rock’s second skyscraper. It was known as the State Bank Building from 1909-1916; the State Bank Building Company held a 99-year lease (till the year 2008) from the Brack estate. The rent was $12,000 per year.
The building cost about $450,000 to construct, including fixtures and vaults. When the State Bank failed, the building was sold to the Boyle Realty Company (a holding company headed by John F. Boyle and Walter G. Hall) for $275,000. On his purchase of the building, Boyle remarked that he got a good deal.
A penthouse was added to the Boyle building in 1949, an ominous year for American cities thanks to the passage of the Housing Act of 1949. I’ll look at newspapers and city directories soon to see if I can pin down the exact moment that the Boyle Building began to decline, first in desirability, then in actual occupancy. The second generation of skyscrapers, beginning with the Tower Building in 1957, would have provided a flashier option for office space.
One of the functions of old buildings, Jane Jacobs notes, is to provide space for new and artistic enterprises that can’t afford to pay rent on newer, fancier spaces. By the 1980s, the Boyle Building’s decline made it attractive to artists. The seventh floor held a de facto collective known as the Magnificent Seventh.
The group, according to a 2008 retrospective by Leroy Donald, “was made up of ad men, public relations people such as the late Dick Lankford and his Lankford Ink, designers such as Bruce Wesson, and other media-connected people … artist Wayne Helms, photographers Willie Allen and DeAnn Shields-Marley, and documentary filmmaker Sandy Hubbard, all of whom were outstanding in their respective fields.”
I cannot wait to watch the renovation of the Boyle Building, to see the attorney general’s office move in, to see ground-floor restaurant tenants draw foot traffic, and to find out what else Little Rock’s commercial center has in store for us as it comes back to life.