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"Nautilus," by Charles Ginnever, in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

“The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is being loved to death.”

That’s the sound bite Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher hopes lawmakers will remember as state bonding proposals are squeezed into shape during the coming week. Overshadowed by massive requests for higher education and an expanded sex-offender facility is a bid for funds to renovate the 11-acre, 22-year-old park that supporters say is suffering from alarming deterioration.

“The issues are fairly dramatic,” says Phillip Bahar, chief of operations and administration for the Walker Art Center, which operates the Sculpture Garden in a unique partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board.

In requests backed by Kelliher and Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, the park board — in its role as a government entity — asked for $8.5 million to fund a long list of improvements planned by the Walker.

“To be clear, none of the money requested touches the art or the maintenance of the art in the garden,” Bahar said. “It’s for the structure of the facility, not its contents.”

Extensive plans
The plans are extensive. If fully funded, the Walker would like to install an irrigation system that traps and reuses rainwater runoff from streets and parking lots. The plants and trees — particularly arborvitae — that create the garden’s “galleries” are dying of old age and need to be replaced. Permeable concrete walkways, which allow rainwater to seep into the soil, would replace the hard limestone-clay pathways. Existing access points for physically challenged visitors would be upgraded. Much of the original concrete and masonry walls are seriously deteriorated and need to be fixed.

The plan also calls for lighting and security upgrades and new flooring in the greenhouse-like Cowles Conservatory.

The Senate version of the bonding bill reduced the $8.5 million request to $2 million, and the House version reduced it to $200,000.

“We call that a place holder, so that it will be discussed in the conference committee,” Kelliher said of the $200,000 House request.

Pogemiller characterized the Senate allocation as particularly good in light of some $3 billion in requests that have been pared to slightly less than $1 billion. The House version is about $1.1 billion.

Kelliher and Pogemiller expect the conference committee to send a final bonding bill to Gov. Tim Pawlenty next week; it will face the governor’s opposition to any funding for arts and civic projects. On Wednesday, Pawlenty spokesman Brian McClung told reporters that the governor would consider a $725 million bonding package, depending on the mix of projects.

7 million-plus visitors
But the Sculpture Garden has a number of things going for it — not the least of which is its popularity and iconic place in the state’s cultural identity. Officially, more than 7 million people have visited the park since it opened in 1988, though that figure is thought to be a conservative estimate because of the deliberately porous nature of an area that is open year-round.

But based on that estimate, Bahar says the Sculpture Garden attracts more visitors than two-thirds of the state’s regional parks and park preserves, and the Walker estimates that nearly half of the visitors are tourists, who pump millions into the city’s visitor-oriented business. It is a particular mecca for school groups — being free, it’s a budget-saver — and about a quarter of its visitors are estimated to be teenagers and younger.

Almost as significant is the park’s cultural symbolism. The garden’s centerpiece, the “Spoonbridge and Cherry”  fountain by husband and wife Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, has become the de facto symbol of Minneapolis, seen in tourist brochures as a visual example of a city’s with-it culture. Bahar says there are some 15,000 online images of Spoonbridge linked to the garden and that vast numbers of tourists - particularly in the summer - make a beeline to the Sculpture Garden to pose next to the big spoon.

Others troop into the Cowles Conservatory to pose for pictures among the plants or near Frank Gehry’s massive carp, “Standing Glass Fish.” On high-school prom nights, the conservatory is packed with teenagers tottering on high heels or fidgeting in rental tuxes.

But maintaining the Sculpture Garden has been a battle, Bahar says, adding that a lot has been learned about environmental technology since the garden was built in the 1980s.

Gaps in the granite
“For instance, we didn’t understand how dynamic the earth was below grade level when the granite walls were put in,” Bahar said. “Two years ago we had to reset all the granite, but already gaps are beginning to appear as things start to settle out.”

Officially, the Sculpture Garden is one of a number of bonding requests being made by the park board, but all the planning and documentation was provided by the Walker.

“They spent a lot of money to put together the proposal and the power-point, to hire the landscape architects and develop all the detailed work steps,” said Anita Tabb, the recently elected park board commissioner whose district includes the Sculpture Garden. “The Walker has been a fabulous partner all along.”

The Walker wants to launch the renovations this summer and in this jobs-oriented political climate has been touting the 170 construction jobs the projects will create almost immediately — not to mention the amount of money generated by landscaping and material purchases. The Walker also established both informational and public lobbying sites to sell the proposal.

But as a practical matter, Bahar says the Walker has put together a priority list of improvements, based on available funding. “Even if funded fully, it’s a modest amount for the asset it represents to the state,” he said. “I know that sounds like rhetoric, but it’s true.”