Kooky art debuted to controversy 30 years ago. It’s stood the test of ‘Light + Time’
Thirty years ago, Raleigh first embraced a 40-foot sculpture of steel and glass for an ugly stretch of Capital Boulevard, a creation that would startle and bewilder the eyeballs rushing past, kicking up so much fuss over public art that the mayor would publicly condemn it as waste.
The Light + Time Tower still stands in a median just north of downtown, perched between an off-ramp and a squat building that used to sell porno mags, defiantly flashing green and purple in a corridor best viewed at 55 mph.
When it first appeared, the tower’s many critics slammed it for looking exactly like the urban infrastructure it aimed to beautify, calling it a glorified microwave dish or a souped-up solar panel unworthy of its $50,000 price tag. Few appreciated its aesthetic intent: to break up sunlight with refracting panels and reflect colors over the passing traffic.
“It looks as though it is ready to blast off,” wrote Betty Pritchett Vaughn in a letter to The N&O, “which is not a bad idea.”
As it nears 30, the tower endures as a curiosity that can start a fight faster than a bumped elbow in a bar. To my thinking, that very quality, its tendency to spark arguments, answers the question “What is art?” with an exclamation point.
But the tower also stands as a sad monument to its creator Dale Eldred, who died one month after he started work, leaving his grieving widow to complete his vision. Whatever criticism still gets tossed the tower’s way, it’s made of burning love down to the last rivet.
“Eldred loved the cluttered road that Raleighites love to ridicule,” wrote The N&O’s Charles Salter Jr. in 1995. “So unabashedly American, he had told his wife on the phone from Raleigh. Also, it wound into the city like a river. Reminded him of the Nile — in need of an obelisk.”
An unusual welcome on Capital Boulevard
A Kansas City sculptor with his work scattered over 17 states, Eldred first took Raleigh’s public art commission in 1993. His job: to create a welcome symbol through the used car lots of Capital Boulevard.
He walked Capital looking for the right jumble of concrete and exhaust fumes and settled on a bend near the Fairview Avenue overpass, where his wife and collaborator, Rebecca Lord, declared, “It’s a wonderful cacophony. It jumps. It happens.”
Then weeks later, with the flooded rivers of Kansas City rising to epic flood levels, he scrambled to move his machinery and artwork to higher ground in his studio, where he accidentally fell 20 feet through a hole cut through the floor. The flooding never reached his studio.
It was around this time in 1994 that Lord approached Raleigh with a plan to salvage both Eldred’s tower and her memory: she would finish it based on 20 minutes of conversation they’d shared and her deep knowledge of his techniques. She promised Raleigh that she and Eldred shared each other’s thoughts.
“Some folks in Raleigh won’t understand “Time + Light Tower,’ ” wrote The N&O at the time. “She knows this. They will say it doesn’t add anything to Capital Boulevard, that it looks dreary on rainy days and is nothing more than a telephone tower trying to pass for a work of art.
“That’s all right. Because she knows there will be other people who pass it every day on their way to and from work and notice the ever-changing colors. People who wonder what it will look like a few hours from now. Or tomorrow. People who connect with it the way her husband wanted.”
The tower leads to some city sparring
After the tower’s approval, Mayor Tom Fetzer lambasted the whole idea.
“It’s a ludicrous waste of tax dollars,” he said in 1995. “We could have hired a new police officer to fight crime. We could have built another home for Habitat for Humanity.”
And though Fetzer won re-election, he earned the reputation as a philistine in many circles. The back-and-forth got a tad personal.
“Raleigh is hardly a city in crisis,” wrote columnist Nicole Brodeur, “and such thinking doesn’t help the aesthetics of the city. Like getting vanilla ice cream every time you go to 31 Flavors. It does the job, but does little to stimulate the senses. And that’s a sad legacy for a mayor who prides himself on being a hip young bachelor who listens to Hootie and the Blowfish, Rollerblades with his dog, Raleigh, and tools around in a Mustang convertible.”
Not long after, Raleigh’s vandals would offer their own art critique, slapping naked-girl mudflap silhouettes on the tower’s panels. But the culture wars ended there, and the tower kept shining.
Once in a while, I’ll pass it when the green glimmers through my windshield, and it’s a reminder on a routine drive to buy paper towels at Target or wash the pollen off my pickup that moments of lasting value can be picked up anywhere — even Capital Boulevard.
Uniquely NC is a News & Observer subscriber collection of moments, landmarks and personalities that define the uniqueness (and pride) of why we live in the Triangle and North Carolina.
