It's not that city administrators in Pembroke Pines don't have a place picked out to house the growing public art project they commissioned as a 9/11 memorial, it's just that the place doesn't exist yet.
Consider it a matter of heart before head. City Center, the mixed-use downtown development dream in which Pembroke Pines planned to display their city-owned tribute, is not a bit closer to reality now than it was seven years and $67 million public dollars ago when it was conceived.
Meanwhile, the commission has grown to the point where it can't be housed just anywhere -- or nowhere at all, which is what artist Felix Gonzalez is currently facing.
"When people ask me where they're going to go, I say, 'I don't know,''' he said of the massive sculptures waiting in a renovated firehouse near Fort Lauderdale. There's a eight-foot-tall fireman, a life-sized girl rescued from wreckage, two 15-foot-tall twisted towers symbolizing the World Trade Center, and an actual steel girder from Ground Zero, donated by the City of New York, that sits atop a giant slab of marble.
There's also more on the way, including a policeman with a search dog and a "jumper" who'll be perched atop one of the towers. Not exactly something the mayor can store in his garage -- that is, if he wants his children to sleep through the night ever again.
Pembroke Pines is racing to solve the problem, with the unveiling set for the attacks' tenth anniversary next year. City Center, however, is not -- it sits, languishing in a poor economy, without a developer.
So far the city has sunk $48,000 into the studio and materials, voted to give Gonzalez and fellow sculptor Benoit Menasche a $20,000 stipend though they'd originally volunteered for the project, and agreed to raise funds for a $300,000 gallery structure to protect the works from rain and rust.
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Now if someone would just redo downtown, they'd have a place to put all that.
