‘Calder Garden’ of sculptures removed from Parkway

This morning, the last sculpture in the Parkway's Calder Garden was carted away.

Sunday, seven stabiles by Alexander Calder still graced the grassy, tree-dotted corner at 22d Street.

Those, and others, had been taking turns adorning the spot since 2002 - when hopes were still alive for establishing a Calder museum there.

A few years ago, 11 sculptures were scattered there.

No more.

The funding arrangement with Pew Chartible Trusts simply expired, officials explained today.

"No one ended the arrangement," said Aviva Kievsky, a spokeswoman for the mayor's office. "It was just an eight-year term that ran itself out."

The removal was well underway yesterday, as first reported overnight by HughE Dillon of PhillyChitChat.com.

This morning, near two rakes, lay the uprooted signs for Untitled, Jerusalem Stabile, The Rocket, Funghi Neri (Black Mushrooms), Angulaire and Discontinuous.

"They ain't coming back," said guard Clarence Cottman, 45, who helped man the site's little guardhouse 24 hours a day.

Those six were returned to the Calder Foundation in New York.

"That is an absolute sin, because the Parkway is an institution for artwork in Philadelphia," said area resident Chris Quinn, 48, out walking his dog.

"I liked what was here a lot," he said.

The seventh sculpture, Three Discs, One Lacking, the only one owned by the city, was to be moved just blocks away.

As two men steadied the stabile - resembling a tripod formed from shadows of oversized horns and Mickey Mouse's ears - a cabled hook dropping from a bar extending from a forklift began to gently hoist.

Soon the sheet-metal spider was scuttling toward a flatbed truck, which would relocate it to Triangle Park, near 17th and the Parkway.

The lights and security cameras, as well as the guardhouse will also go, said Cottman, who expects to be reassigned.

"It's definitely going to be unsafe at night if they leave the benches and there's no electricity for the lights," said Dillon, 45, a paralegal who lives near the Art Museum. "It's going to be an eyesore."

Before the Calders came, homeless men and women camped there at night, Cottman said.

"It's going to come back to a tent city," he predicted.

A man lay sprawled on one of the half-dozen wood-slatted benches, a stuffed trash bag close by.

A sign near the sidewalk now had less reason to remain.

Headlined "Calder Garden," it explained:

"Through the generous support of the Pew Charitable Trusts, and through a collaboration between the Calder Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the City of Philadelphia, and the Fairmont Park Commission, a series of outdoor installations of sculpture by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is talking place along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway."

As the point ironically points out, "the work of three generations of Calders can be seen in dramatic succession on the Parkway" - from Alexander Calder's Ghost mobile over the Art Museum's Great Stair Hall to father Alexander Stirling Calder's Swann Memorial Fountain at Logan Square to grandfather Alexander Milne Calder's many sculptures gracing City Hall, including the statue of William Penn.

Dreams of a Calder museum took flight in 1999, when a 40-foot red stabile called Eagle was perched outside the Art Museum.

In May 2002, a Calder piece called Ordinary, featuring a colorful mobile suspended from its top, marked the proposed site, across from the Rodin Museum.

In November 2004, 10 more works, including the city's Three Discs, One Lacking, were added, creating the Calder Garden.

Prospects for a museum, though, dimmed the following year amid uncertainties about private and public funding, as well as commitments of artworks from the Calder Foundation.

Even as the Calders move on, across the Parkway, dust keeps rising from the demolition project clearing way for another museum - a relocated Barnes Foundation.