I've had Public Art on my mind - and in front of my lens - all this week. Starting with news of the theft of the Native American horseman - half of the two-rider sculpture "Athletes of the Race" - from the empty lot that was once the Garden State Park racetrack in Cherry Hill. I first photographed the pair of life size bronzes - the Indian and the racing jockey running together - for my Daily Photo back in March. Freelance photographer Tom Mihalek had told me about seeing them hidden behind some piles of rubble and demolition debris by the NJ Transit tracks, between the old and new Home Depots on Route 70.
I often send photos back to the newspaper from the Panera Bread there, so I couldn't believe I'd never noticed them before. When I first hiked back to photograph them on that cold day, I hadn't gone twenty yards from the road when a security guard pulled up and started hollering something at me. I just kept walking. It wasn’t very polite of me, but I made him get out of his security vehicle and follow me in all the way to the statues before I stopped pretending I couldn’t hear him. Nobody noticed the thieves while they knocked it down, or even that one horse was missing for almost a week. When the story broke, the developers offered $50,000 for its safe return, but speculation was that it was stolen for scrap. Just the day before I had worked on a story about how the rising prices paid for scrap metal have driven thefts of car batteries, cables, gutters, and even manhole covers. Another reason I was captivated all weekend. Then it turned out that's exactly what happened to the Indian - he was cut up and sold. The $500,000 statue paying out $3,900 as scrap.
The sculptures were created by Thomas Schomberg, which gives me an excuse to post the links to two more of my slide shows on another well-known public piece (Please click on the photos above). Schomberg is the very same artist who made the Rocky statute - originally a prop for the second movie sequel - now standing below the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Next up my on week of Public Art was a visit to the Northern Liberties studio of modern glass artist Ray King. Until I drove up Third Street, I had completely forgotten I'd met and photographed him almost ten years ago with he installed The Beacons, at Broad and Washington - as the entry to the Avenue of the Arts.
King specializes in working with high tech film coatings on glass that bend, or split, light wavelengths into a wide spectrum of brilliant colors.He creates site-specific Public Art projects all over the world, but just put up a new piece here, called Hello David – an homage to 18th-century Philadelphia inventor David Rittenhouse who played with light-diffraction two hundred years ago. It went up on the day after the summer solstice, in honor of Rittenhouse's astronomical work. Inquirer critic Inga Saffron did the story on Sunday. I photographed him and his work twice on Friday. First in the afternoon, after checking with him to see what time the light works best on it, and then after shooting a housing story in Camden and Olympic soccer player Carli Lloyd in Delran, I drove back to Philadelphia
When I first called about taking photos, Ray was in Utah working on a new piece there. His wife Debbie had told me that the work, on the outside wall of his studio, overlooking a deck on their adjacent home, looked great illuminated at night. So since I am on the night shift, I knew I would be returning to take more shots of the wall. In the midday sun, it was almost too brilliant to look at. While shooting close-ups of the individual glass triangles, I noticed Ray’s reflection in a few – the ones off axis with the sun – and tried to capture what the selective focus of my eyes and brain were seeing. So by opening my lens up and focusing past the textured surface of the glass, I came close to making his reflection sharp without the triangles getting too distracting. At twilight, I knew I only had a few minutes to shoot him, and I thought, for just a second, that I would have Debbie hold a small strobe aimed at his face up on the roof top deck, which I could trigger from my camera on the street below. It would be a dramatic portrait. But as I looked up at the position of Ray standing on the roof, I almost immediately determined I would silhouette him against the work rather than have him distract from it. Do you think I did the right thing? How would you have photographed him and his artwork?
Then, still speaking of public art, even if it was only briefly public, there was Alex Irvine, last seen in this blog, and in the Scene Through the Lens newspaper column pushing his life size sculpture through Center City.
He recently emailed me to report it was just sold for a price greater than its weight in scrap metal (although it's made of stoneware ceramic). He says it was sold and installed in the person's house in less than a week of his taking it to the gallery. He also said he would be making another volcanic meditating figure for Chicago's SOFA - International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art - Expo in Chicago in November. This is the time exposure photo Alex was making of the piece seated near City Hall when I first saw him.
Finally, in today's newspaper, a few older pieces, destined to become part of a new Public Art work someday. The demolition of the Race Street Firehouse - the last building remaining on the footprint - began yesterday.
For years as I walked from the Inquirer offices to Center City I’d admired the firefighting gargoyles above the big doors of the Italian Renaissance/Medieval Gothic castle designed by J. Molitor, the city's chief architect. 
It stood guard since 1925 and was a historic building until the Historical Commission decertified it last year.
The Pennsylvania Department of General Services, the state agency overseeing the expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, removed the gargoyles and other decorative features of the building before the demolition. They’ve promised all the adornments - six gargoyles, six columns, two coats of arms/seals, the cornerstone, two doors with ornamental pilasters, and two fireplaces - will be displayed inside the new Convention Center when it is completed.
It was the DGS that knocked down the two historic facades on North Broad Street last year – at 6am on the Saturday before Christmas - in defiance of a protection ruling issued two days earlier by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
