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Egads. Fred Rogers as a man-eating mud monster? Something has gone terribly wrong.
I went to see the big bronze Fred on the North Shore the first weekend it opened, which happened to be sunny and warm for November, with temperatures in the high 60s. The place was swarming with parents and kids, the latter jockeying for the chance to have their pictures taken sitting in Mister Rogers' lap.
The same weekend, thousands came to see the "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" set one last time at WQED.
Pittsburgh's affection for Fred Rogers knows no bounds, and for good reason. He was the best of us.
But what of Robert Berks' riverfront sculpture that's been ridiculed coast to coast on late-night TV?
Part of the humor in the Jimmy Kimmel animation, which shows the statue reaching out and biting off the head of a visitor, stems from the fact that Rogers was the gentlest of men.
He was also the most self-effacing; we can guess what he would have thought about being memorialized in 7,000 pounds of bronze. That's why the project's supporters call it "A Tribute to Children."
We all know it's really a tribute to Rogers, recognized for his life's work on behalf of children. But what, really, does it do for children, beyond the brief photo op?
PDFWhen the project was announced, fait accompli, in 2007, I wrote that the money -- $3 million -- would be better spent underwriting an interactive children's park in Rogers' name. It also would have made a fine contribution to the Children's Museum endowment.
When Kimmel joked that King Friday decreed the statue would be built, he wasn't far off. The late Mellon heiress Cordelia Scaife May, whose Colcom Foundation funded the project, wanted to honor her friend in a permanent and prominent way. Pittsburgh did what it needed to do to make it happen, although the project was opposed by the Riverlife Task Force and the Heinz Endowments, which supported construction of the North Shore Riverfront Park.
The sculpture sits in the park on a new concrete plaza that juts out over the river where the Allegheny meets the Ohio at the base of the old Manchester Bridge pier, which dates to 1915. The idea of reusing the pier as a viewing platform has been around for a while. In 1969, as the city prepared to take down the bridge, it floated plans for attaching to the pier two balcony-like viewing platforms and bronze reliefs from the historic bridge. That never happened, and the pier stood as a soot-darkened monolith for 40 years.
I thought Astorino's reinvention of it as a keyhole-shaped gateway would be hokey and destructive, but it has turned out better than I anticipated. The opening isn't so much a keyhole as a broad arch that narrows at the bottom and nicely frames a view of the Point.
It also frames the Rogers sculpture in the foreground. Since the 1960s, a large part of the art world has regarded outdoor figurative sculpture as old-school plop art, installed with little regard for its context. In this case, Astorino has designed the context specifically for the sculpture, so it feels less plopped. You couldn't find a more prominent location, but I thought its disconnectedness from a neighborhood would be a problem. It isn't. Families are finding it quite accessible as part of the riverfront park.
Naturalistic sculptures, such as Berks' Albert Einstein in Washington, D.C., and Richard Caliguiri here, are more revealing of their subject's personality and interests than the ramrod-straight heroes of yesteryear. That seems less true of the Rogers piece.
Where are the children to whom he dedicated his life? You only have to see kids queueing up to scramble onto his lap to answer that one. They complete it; without them it's just a larger-than-life man inexplicably tying his shoes next to the river.
But with "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" reduced to a single weekly airing here, at 6 a.m. Saturday morning on WQED's digital cable Create Channel, how long will they continue to interact with this sculpture so clearly built for the ages?
Some people are turned off by Berks' craggy style. I do like that it reveals the sculptor's process, the building up of clay, the very earth from which life slithered eons ago. On his program, Mister Rogers often visited artists in their studios and talked with them about how and why they made their work. That's part of what I think of when I look at this piece.
Some people are flagging it for unnecessary roughness, and rightly so. The trouble with the Rogers piece, which comes near the end of Berks' long career, is that there doesn't seem to have been any refinement from maquette to monumental sculpture. In fact, the maquette is more refined, right down to the tie under the sweater that seems to be missing or minimized in the bronze.
You know it won't be long before the Rogers sculpture and its framed view of the Point take their place among the beloved iconic images of Pittsburgh.
Yet the real test of any memorial sculpture is not how it's regarded in its first few months and years, but how it withstands the test of time, long after its subject has faded from living memory.
Let's hope this one inspires our great-great-grandchildren to discover who Fred Rogers was and what he stood for, and not just shake their heads and wonder what we were thinking.
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