Comments (0) Best Example of Embarrassing Public Art - 2010
Union Square
Union Square once boasted a glorious trademark image in the giant sign over the old S. Klein department store on the park's east side: "S. Klein on the Square," it proudly announced over a massive angled L-square ruler. S. Klein fell long ago to the jackhammers of Zeckendorf's banal towers that replaced it, but there was a chance to revive the square's jaunty spirit in the late '90s when millions in government subsidies were handed to a politically connected developer erecting a massive building on the square's south side. Instead, the Related Companies and other bureaucrats managed to kill the streetscape with soaring blank walls and the city's most hideous work of public art: a series of swirling brick rings surrounding a chunk of mounted bedrock and a gaping hole emitting a jet of steam and a bronze hand, signifying . . . what? Even more obtuse is the row of 15 lighted digits alongside it all. It's supposed to tell the time, but good luck reading that clock. Such felonies deserve their own statute in the penal code: Desecration of Public Space, First-Degree.
