Who named "Civic Space Park"?
You’re probably familiar with Janet Echelman’s monumental “Her secret is patience” sculpture. It’s 100 feet high and sits suspended from three steel poles in a small park on Central just north of Van Buren and just south of the Westward Ho.
The name of the site?
“Civic Space Park.”
What bureaucratic process produced that moniker?
A recent story in the Republic was about a new coffee shop. (Yeah, a pretty lame idea for a story, but that’s the Republic for you.)
Being passably interested in coffee and having a personal commitment to familiarize myself with every word of the non-car, -sports and -real estate sections of the paper each day, I read the whole story and had no idea where the park was, until, near the end, it made an oblique reference to “a $2.4 million suspended art piece” on the site.
PHXated isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, so it took a while to register the import of the words, and then I realized the story was talking about the park with the Eshelman sculpture.
Now, as I noted above, the sculpture has a name—"Her secret is patience"—but it really doesn’t. No one I’ve met could tell me the name, and no one I’ve met can name the park, either.
So what should it be called?
“Jellyfish Park”? “Cronkite Park”? (After the J-School building across the street?)
“Ho Park,” as a reference to the landmark hotel on the park’s north side, is probably not ideal.
Any other ideas?
p.s.: All that said, PHXated thinks the sculpture is, in the end, unsuccessful. While the idea is enticing and the work itself attractive, particularly at night, I think ultimately Echelman never overcame the weight of the superstructure her vision required. The great steel towers in the abstract clash with the lightness of the work itself; and in the physical both obstruct the view you look at the site from afar and overwhelm the space when you’re right there.
6:00 AM



