Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Park to house veterans memorial, but chosen design irks some residents

Huntridge Circle Park

Justin M. Bowen

Architect Kasey Baker was the dissenting vote on the design of a veterans memorial at Huntridge Circle Park, two blocks from her home.

Click to enlarge photo

Alterations are yet to be done on Douwe Blumberg's design of a memorial, which will adorn the south end of Huntridge Circle Park.

Click to enlarge photo

Situated in a median on Maryland Parkway, Huntridge Circle Park has been chosen to house the Las Vegas Veterans Memorial. A recently chosen design for the memorial is being revised after neighbors complained.

Huntridge Circle Park

Las Vegas Veterans Memorial

A rendering of the Las Vegas Veterans Memorial designed by Douwe Blumberg. Launch slideshow »

A fatal stabbing over a broken sprinkler head four years ago prompted Las Vegas to close Huntridge Circle Park, shuttering the 3-acre space that had turned into a makeshift, daytime homeless camp soon after it was redesigned.

Today, it’s one of the prettiest parks you can drive by — and that’s about the only way to see its greenery because it’s still closed and lies smack in the middle of Maryland Parkway on a median.

But moves are afoot to reopen the park by building the Las Vegas Veterans Memorial there. For more than a year, a group that includes a Huntridge neighborhood representative, veterans, a city Arts Commission member and the memorial fundraisers who have spearheaded the idea, have winnowed more than 200 memorial ideas.

Two weeks ago, the Las Vegas City Council received a report on the chosen Douwe Blumberg design, which still has to undergo architectural revisions before approval.

Committee members didn’t all agree on the design, and one critic said the committee should start over.

Blumberg’s design encompasses a swath of land bordered by a low-slung wall that funnels visitors into an entrance at the southern tip of the park. Once inside, dark walls in a half-circle form the background for statues of nine soldiers from various wars — Revolutionary, World War II and so on — all facing the center. A singular bronze statue of three people representing a family also face inward. Their focus is a bronze figure of three modern-era soldiers escorting a wounded comrade to safety.

Although Blumberg’s design was chosen 4-1 by the committee, the no-vote represented park neighbors. Kasey Baker, who lives two blocks away, was the dissenting vote and is also the architect whose design reopened the park in 2003.

She disliked how the design funneled people on sidewalks on the park’s outer edge because of the danger. When her design was constructed, neighbors created tire-based barriers on the curved corners because cars zip around them like they’re on a NASCAR oval. “Those barriers are driven into all the time,” she said, wondering aloud if people walking on the curb would be similar targets.

Baker also said the memorial isn’t integrated into the rest of the park, closed off from the curlicue walking labyrinth, the martini-shaped picnic tables and open-air stage of her design, which won an American Institute of Architects Nevada award in 2004.

She also disagrees with committee members who want to create a memorial that would be a tourist attraction. That same complaint has been sounded over another plan several miles to the south, where entertainer Wayne Newton is squaring off against neighbors who say the proposal to turn his home into a tourist destination will disquiet the neighborhoods.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily the best place for busloads of tourists to be driving into,” Baker said of Huntridge Circle Park. “It’s a neighborhood, after all.”

Huntridge sits just east of the John S. Park Historic District, which the American Planning Association last month named one of “10 Great Neighborhoods for 2010,” a designation that speaks to the uniqueness of the downtown Las Vegas core.

Bill Marion, a member of the selection committee, understands not everyone will like the design. But Baker’s concerns are taken seriously, and before the park goes to the City Council for approval the artist, will work them in, he said.

“There are a lot of design issues that have to be resolved,” Marion said. “But you have to realize this is conceptual. What we presented is not final.”

Although Marion said four final designs all had “great merits,” the family component of Blumberg’s resonated.

“The relationship of the family members to those who serve was a real strong component,” he said. “That and the historical nature of the work.”

As for concerns about disrupting the neighborhood with tourist busloads, Marion doesn’t think that will happen.

“I do think it will draw attention because of the nature of the memorial, but do I think that means that thousands of people will come to see it?” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial” in Washington.

The committee also didn’t choose Huntridge Circle Park as the memorial site, the city did, he said. The Las Vegas Veterans Memorial Corp., a nonprofit group, went to the city with plans to raise the estimated $800,000 to build it. “And the city said it would like it to be at Huntridge Circle Park,” Marion said.

Lisa Stamanis, of the city’s Cultural Arts Commission, referred all questions about the memorial back to Marion.

Aside from safety issues, Baker said she is not a fan of the design.

But during an initial vote, another committee member, Dana Lee, appeared to agree with Baker as Lee voted against the Blumberg design and for the second-place design by artist Cliff Garten. In a later vote, Lee changed her mind.

“I’m all for respecting the viewpoint of the vets” on the committee, Lee said. However, her tastes lean more toward the abstract, which might not coincide with the tastes of military veterans, she said.

“For me, I felt it was important for veterans to get a project,” Lee said. “It’s a veterans memorial. I haven’t served in their place and in their shoes.”

For a neutral opinion, the Sun looked outside Nevada.

Renowned art and culture critic David Hickey, who taught for several years at UNLV, where he received the MacArthur Fellowship, is the distinguished professor of criticism for the masters of fine arts program in the Art & Art History Department at the University of New Mexico. He looked at several images from brochures prepared by Blumberg and Garten.

Garten’s design is reminiscent of the Vietnam Memorial, with low dark walls adorned with historic quotes such as “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” that lead to five black pillars carved with the name of the five services: Coast Guard, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and Army. Garten’s design contains no human figures.

Hickey said he didn’t like either design.

“It all looks like pretty standard stuff,” he said.

He worried, too, about graffiti. “If they do anything, I suggest they do it 8 feet up in the air or have constant security, like the Vietnam Memorial, to protect it,” he said.

Chuck Twardy, a former Las Vegas writer who lives in North Carolina, has written about the Oklahoma City and World War II memorials for Metropolis magazine. After he saw the brochure images, he suggested that “they should really try again.”

Blumberg’s memorial “is way too busy. There’s too much going on. You reach sculptures by passing sculpture groups, and the controlled experience format is overbearing, starting with walling off the street and funneling people through an entrance zone,” he said.

Twardy added that “a museum tour of figures is bound to dilute the experience.”

Marion likened early opinions of the memorial to those who attacked UNLV’s “Flashlight” sculpture by Claes Oldenberg or with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

“The ‘Flashlight’ was met with widespread criticism at the time,” he said. It was dedicated in 1981. “Now, it’s universally accepted and even part of the logo of the university. Even the Vietnam Memorial was met with controversy and now there are models of it that tour the country.”

When it’s all done, Marion thinks the historical elements of the Las Vegas memorial will “draw people’s interest and acceptance.”

But will it prevent the homeless from congregating there? That was the neighborhood’s biggest complaint, after the park reopened in 2003, that the homeless were rude to residents and used the park’s water features — sprinklers and showers intended for play — as showers and makeshift clothes washers. In November 2006, Brian Thrasher stabbed Chris Robinson to death after Thrasher became enraged when the sprinklers came on unexpectedly, drenching his belongings and his pets.

He reacted by breaking several sprinkler heads, upsetting other homeless people and resulting in the fight.

For years, the city wondered how to reopen the park without it again becoming a homeless encampment. In 2008, UNLV students envisioned both a veterans memorial and a skating park at the site.

Now, the memorial is close to reality. Like the “Flashlight” and other memorials, only time will tell how it is embraced.

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