On August 2, 2005, sculptor Harold Balazs, 77, sprints nude through the newly intalled Rotary Fountain at Riverfront Park in Spokane. Balazs has sculpted the 24-foot decorative columns for the fountain, along with a 30-foot central ring that has been trucked into downtown Spokane and elevated atop the columns. The "big sprinkler," as Balazs calls the fountain, includes an underground mechanical vault and a paved courtyard, and costs $1.5 million to build and install. On this test run, overhead jets shower water from the ring. Behind the scenes, Balazs disrobes before streaking through the falling water.
Collaborative Effort
Harold Balazs (1928-2017), perhaps the foremost artist to export his work from Spokane over the last century, collaborated with landscape architect Bob Perron to create the Rotary Fountain. It encourages people in the summer to cool off beneath its steady stream.
The Rotary Club of Spokane commissioned the fountain in cooperation with the Spokane Parks Department. It was one of Balazs's largest projects. He had informed the Rotarians he planned to sprint through it on its test run, but he did not tell them he planned to do it nude. He was a prankster who exercised a healthy oppositional-defiant streak. Former Spokane Arts Director Karen Mobley narrated the sprint for Hannelore Sudermann at Washington State University, the artist’s alma mater: "Suddenly Balazs, who had disappeared into the back of a truck, 'rips off all his clothes and runs down the ramp and into the fountain,' says Mobley. 'Right in front of those poor Rotarians'" (Sudermann).
In the years to come, the fountain was to hemorrhage cash and embarrass its architects and promoters. It would cost as much to repair as it did to build. It uses a pump and a filter like a swimming pool to keep the water up to healthful code. First the pump developed a leak and had to be rebuilt. Then the control board for the computer that runs the pump failed. A flood rendered the electrical equipment useless. Due to a blunder with chemicals, stains appeared on the concrete and the steel and could not be removed. Five years after its debut, the fountain had to be shut down – the first of several engineering stoppages, add-ons, and reconfigurations.
The Parks Department had never tried to maintain a product of such complexity. Besides the overhead ring that shoots water high in the air, separate streams of water are meant to drizzle down the columns. Beneath the paved courtyard, the inner works became the chief concern. In an ironic comedy of errors, maintenance vehicles had driven over and damaged those inner works. "Intake grates, nozzles and lights are broken or missing," Mike Prager wrote in April 2017, eight months before Balazs died. "One underground vault hatch is distorted and won’t close properly" (Prager).
After Prager reported on the fountain’s maddening glitches, the prognosis got worse. "When Hydro Dramatics, a national fountain consultant firm, examined the Rotary Fountain this February, the verdict was ugly" (Walters). The sump pump, installed below the courtyard to recirculate the water showered from above, proved too weak for the task. Several of the recessed lights in the courtyard to illuminate the water had shorted out. The water was unsanitary. Some jets shot with such force, they violated municipal codes and ran the risk of injuring guests and making the City of Spokane liable. None of these problems was the fault of Harold Balazs.
The blame lay with the landscape architecture firm that Balazs had been paired with. Now, however, the problems had become the responsibility of Spokane Parks, which would have to shoulder the million dollars in upgrades. To meet new codes, to repair current problems, and to avoid future breakdowns, the complete infrastructure had to be renovated – the pump and its mechanisms, the controls, piping, lighting, and nozzles. In short, an overhaul of everything was needed, except the columns and the perforated ring that Balazs had crafted. Frazzled Parks Department director Leroy Eadie left the city less than two years later, in his early 50s.
When septuagenarian Balazs streaked through the "big sprinkler" on its test run, his escapade came off like a jeer in the face of the city’s leaders. Balazs found municipalities to be as tedious and frustrating as colleges, corporations, religious groups, and kindred institutions. "I found the more money, the more scoundrels show up," he told Hannelore Sudermann. His most famous project, an "almost unreadable, circular, curlicue letter design" from the 1960s, is titled Transcend the Bullshit. At the time he streaked beneath the Rotary fountain, Balazs likely intuited how much exasperation was going to ensue from it. His Transcend the Bullshit artwork applies to the fountain debacle that the City of Spokane recruited him to help create.
