THE BACK
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BACKSTORY
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bout 40 years ago, an important piece of sculpture was removed from one of Washington, D.C.’s historic urban parks, but it wasn’t the work of thieves. The National Park Service dismantled the artwork, the Noyes Armillary Sphere, to protect it from greater harm than it had already sustained. Since then, the piece has gone missing—1,500 pounds of civic art seemingly disappeared in one of the federal government’s myriad warehouses, perhaps resting next to Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant. The lost armillary sphere was a majestic bronze astrological timepiece that once stood in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., a cultural landscape that is under rehabilitation after generations of neglect. The 12-acre park, which took 22 years to design and build, overlooks the city on a prominent bluff less than two miles north of the White House along 16th Street Northwest. The landscape architect George Burnap and the architect Horace Peaslee drew up plans for the park in 1914 after a tour of European gardens. They liberally integrated scores of iconic Italian and even French landscape elements into their design, saving a place for the then-unrealized sphere on a lower terrace at the foot of a monumental water cascade. It was one of five original art installations designed for the park. The sphere took six years to design and execute. In 1930, Charles Moore, the chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, was charged with securing a sculptural work for the park. Ferruccio Vitale, a prominent landscape architect and member of the commission, had a keen sense of stagecraft and proposed an armillary
its destruction to the vandalism of the 1968 race riots that roiled the city after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Others suggest that generations of children hastened its structural failure by treating it more like a jungle gym than a piece of fine art. Jennewein’s elegant design with its slender socle—the armature connecting the sphere to its base—was so fatigued that it could no longer support its own weight.
SPHERE NOT THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HAS LOST A HUGE PIECE OF PUBLIC ART. BY JAMES O’DAY, ASLA
sphere to serve as a dramatic counterbalance to the park’s great cascade. He first turned to the sculptor Paul Manship, impressed by his Cochran Armillary at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. As the expected cost of $30,000 was too high, Moore selected Carl Paul Jennewein, a noted sculptor, instead. The benefactor was Bertha Noyes, who pledged $15,000 toward the project to memorialize her late sister, Edith Noyes.
fect, but lack of funds forestalled the dramatic gilding. The massive sphere, 16 feet around, was cast at the Roman Bronze Works in Queens, New York, for $2,800 and took 14 months to complete. It was dedicated on November 10, 1936. The armillary was an exceptional piece of American civic art but had an astonishingly short shelf life, only 37 years on its site. The park service, which oversees the park, removed it in the 1970s to prevent further damage from vandalism and neglect. All that remains of the lost armillary is the exquisitely rendered bronze putto that stood at its base, symbolizing the birth of another day. The putto is in storage.
Jennewein completed the design within a year. The sphere’s principal feature was an equatorial band ornamented with deep reliefs of Roman numerals and Zodiac figures. A massive bronze arrow, pointing to the North Star, pierced through the sphere and served as its gnomon. Jennewein proposed that the bronze There are two competing theories be fire gilded and “burnished to a about the demise of the Noyes bright color” to give it a gold-leaf ef- Armillary Sphere. Some attribute
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There is no official park service report on the sphere’s fate. Over the years, park service staff tried to rescue and document the sphere. A report by the Historic American Building Survey on Meridian Hill Park in 1985 raised awareness of the park’s contributing artwork and its cultural significance. Around 1988, Darwina Neal, FASLA, a senior landscape architect at the park service, sought to have a facsimile produced; estimates ranged from $48,000 to $90,000, but no funding was found. Years later, John Parsons, the associate regional director of the park service, thought that the sphere was important enough to “restore it on its original base to the exact historic scale, design, and specifications.” In 1997, he approved a request by the park service project manager Glenn DeMarr to fabricate a full-scale aluminum and steel maquette. It was eventually made around 2004 at a cost of $8,840. Today, that rudimentary model is stored at a maintenance facility near Washington. The only vestige of the sphere in Meridian Hill Park is its polished granite pedestal, hidden behind an overgrown hawthorn hedge. JAMES O’DAY, ASLA, IS A HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT BASED IN WASHINGTON, D.C.