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Thursday, January 24, 2013

City Remember When the Chihuly Museum Promised to Build a Playground for the Kiddies?

Posted by Cienna Madrid on Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 2:50 PM

I can't help but notice that the Chihuly museum has been open and raking in the dough for eight months and yet we are still without the concessionary million-dollar playground that backers promised to build in exchange for plunking their museum down on public land for 30-odd years.

Per the museum's lease agreement with the city, the Seattle Center is supposed to work with the Chihuly group to assemble an "Artists at Play Advisory Committee" who will then painstakingly advise them on how to build a goddamn playground.

But as far as I can tell, there is no advisory group, let alone a plan to build the damn thing or anything resembling a timeline to get it done.

I called the Seattle Center, Seattle City Council member Jean Godden (who oversees the Seattle Center committee) and the mayor's office to find out what the holdup is; the mayor's office at least promised to get back to me today or tomorrow with details. "It’s part of our agreement with them, so it’s going to get built," said mayoral spokesman Aaron Pickus. So... they could build it next year or 29 years from now, when their lease is set to expire?

Remember, Chihuly backers also "agreed" to build a 1,700-square-foot retail gallery that would showcase other Northwest artists, and then broke that promise faster than you can shatter a $5,000 artistic sperm centerpiece.

The Chihuly museum's grandiose talk of creating a legacy for the city seemed to only last as long as the effervescence in their champagne toasts on opening night.

UPDATE: The mayor's office says that the Seattle Center will be sending out a call for "Artists at Play" applicants sometime in the next few months, with the hope of formalizing a committee by April. It seems that one of the holdups is that original playground location was instead used to sell trinkets for the Seattle Center 50th anniversary celebration, so we have no actual designated park space. They're scouting out a new location now. Hopefully it won't wind up right next to the dumpsters.

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Cue snotty, defensive rant from Meinert on why we're all anti-business assholes for having the temerity to hold C'thulhuy/Wright to the terms of the contract they agreed to in...3...2...1...

Posted by COMTE

on January 24, 2013 at 3:02 PM

Just curious...how much bread are these cats earning?

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on January 24, 2013 at 3:05 PM

Sorry, but why would anyone want to build a glass playground for children? Think of the liability!

Posted by Mike Friedman on January 24, 2013 at 3:07 PM

I'm envisioning something for the bottle kids from Trailer Park Boys. The Chihuly patrons would have to cross through a barrage of thrown bottles and shards o' glass before they could make it inside the "museum".

Posted by SPG on January 24, 2013 at 3:35 PM

Were these things not in a binding contract? If not, why not?

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on January 24, 2013 at 3:35 PM

@1: <3

It's time to stop pretending that Seattle Center is a beacon of civic pride and instead acknowledge that it's a playground for rich assholes.

Posted by trstr on January 24, 2013 at 3:38 PM

@3: Glass, appropriately engineered, could actually be a really cool medium for a playground. You can build some remarkably durable, safe structures out of glass if you know what you're doing. You can go stand out on a plate of glass suspended from the side of a building 1,353 feet in the air in Chicago... hundreds of thousands of people do it every year with no ill consequences (except, perhaps, some vertigo-induced puking). I see no reason they could not come up with some clever uses for glass in the playground they're supposed to pay for.

Here's hoping, for everyone's sake, they hold up their end of the bargain or I imagine there'll be some folks finding new ways to use good-old fashioned building materials like, say, bricks, here in our public space-aware little burg...

Posted by pheeeew!crack!boom! on January 24, 2013 at 3:50 PM

maybe they are trying to figure out how they can charge $20 to get in there?

Posted by kellyllek

on January 24, 2013 at 3:55 PM

OH! Chihuly. I like his art. My favorite is the glass one that looks like a sea anemone made out of dildos. And I really like that one that's like a bunch of orange, spirally dildos in a big glass diaphragm. And everyone will probably agree, that his hanging chandelier made out of tangled, brightly colored dildos is really pretty.

Posted by evolume

on January 24, 2013 at 3:59 PM

@5, they backed out of the NW gallery before the contract was finalized; the playground is in the lease agreement (which I link to). The problem is there's no sort of timeline attached to it, which is why I think it's up to the city to hold them accountable for making it happen sooner rather than later.

Posted by Cienna Madrid on January 24, 2013 at 4:02 PM

Fuck Chihuly. I'd rather have the Fun Forest back.

Posted by Desslok on January 24, 2013 at 4:36 PM

It might just be that Dale is too busy putting his name on other peoples' work to get around to designing a playground himself. I'd suggest that The Stranger design it for him, so that we can make the "We Swear Dale Chihuly Personally Designed This Children's Park" a reality.

Posted by Scalpel on January 24, 2013 at 4:42 PM

Is this another instance of Parks screwing up a "public private partnership".

Don't force them to do something they don't want (like what they promised to do) or the City may get sued - as happened with those asshole developers that took over Building 11 in Magnuson Park. A crappy contract was a big part of that.

Parks department should be out clearing trails and coaching basketball, not writing contracts....

Posted by south downtown on January 24, 2013 at 4:57 PM

Thanks for following up for us on this, Cienna.

Posted by gloomy gus on January 24, 2013 at 5:06 PM

Thank you Slog

Posted by dalefarnham on January 24, 2013 at 6:06 PM

@SPG - YES. THANK YOU.

Posted by Soupytwist

on January 24, 2013 at 7:42 PM

Is that thing hanging from the ceiling in the Benaroya foyer protected by plexiglass? Because if not, we could get together a $1/person pot of money to hire an Everett AquaSox pitcher to buy a Symhony ticket and...

Posted by sarah70 on January 24, 2013 at 8:46 PM

#7

Carkeek park has a great playground made up of mosaics and embedded pottery and tiles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/irene_c/522…

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on January 24, 2013 at 9:57 PM

To hell with children! Seattle is a city of DINKs, gays and singletons. We're San Francisco with more mildew! We don't need no stinking playgrounds. They've got that shit in the 'burbs!

Posted by TheBadSeed131313 on January 24, 2013 at 10:40 PM

That's the funny thing about actually doing things, rather than complaining about folks that are trying to do things... It actually takes time.

Posted by timmiche on January 24, 2013 at 10:58 PM

@9,

Doesn't all his crap look like dildoes? Or inflated condoms? Or chili peppers?

I like the chili peppers.

Posted by TheBadSeed131313 on January 24, 2013 at 11:12 PM

@21 Yes, you have successfully recognized the joke @9. Well done.

Here's a ball. Would you like to bounce it?

Posted by ScrawnyKayaker on January 25, 2013 at 3:19 AM

Am I an artist if I tell someone else to draw a picture then put my name on it?

Posted by monkey on January 25, 2013 at 6:57 AM

Oh, and translation of the mayor's office's statement: "We stopped caring the second Chihuly moved in and we would never have noticed if someone hadn't brought it up so we are rushing to make it look like we are doing something about it now.

Posted by monkey on January 25, 2013 at 6:59 AM

I just looped back from 2020 with this Seattle EndTimes review of the playground:

The long-awaited Playground of Glassitude opened on June 13 with free admission for the first 25 children. Right out of the gate, the most popular feature was the bouncy Chihuly, which allows up to 4 kids at a time to trampoline on Dale Chihuly's outstreched belly--which now extends an impressive 10-feet in diameter.

Also popular is the clean-up room--an actual event room inside the center that lets kids experience the janitorial fun of cleaning up dirty dinnerware, glasses, and sequins from the previous night's $2,000/plate function.

Elsewhere, kids were seen stroking an enormous life-sized mold of Chihuly's ego, with hidden speakers blasting an endless loop of pedantic audio quotes culled from the artiste's record-breaking 659 appearances on Evening Magazine.

Expressing the foundation's sentiment of the landmark, Chihuly museum PR representative, XeNNa(tm) said: "well, it is what it is. A visionary, prototypical representation of the cumbersome urban child; opaque, droll, loutish."

The opening of the playground ends a 10-year, record-breaking superfund project. Initially contracted in the Chihuly Museum agreement with Seattle Center, the deal went south when the museum declared itself the embassy of Glass in 2013, and in the span of just three days, built 50-foot tall, 30-foot thick walls of glass around the self-proclaimed Fortress of Glassitude. Donating just $650 strongarmed from unsuspecting guests, the remainder of the $6.4 million project was funded by tolling Mercer Street, which has resulted in up to 34 mile backups during rush hour and weekends.

The playground is open every third Saturday of the month. Admission rates are $34.95 for the first 30 minutes, $20 for each 15 minutes, cash only; embassy employees receive a 15% discount, and group discounts are available for residents of the 500 global Chihuly art fiefdoms.

More...

Posted by looper345dash45 on January 26, 2013 at 2:06 PM