As Salt Lake building comes down, ‘The Gulls’ wait to fly again
Salt Lake City » Sculpture is in storage while performing arts center is under construction.
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Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune
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Fifty years ago this summer, 100 seagulls took flight on Salt Lake City’s Main Street — and stayed there for decades.
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Now, 65 of them sit in cardboard boxes in a storage room in a dilapidated theater, waiting for their new home to be built.
The other 35 are missing.
The bronze-on-nickel seagulls are part of a sculpture, "The Gulls of Salt Lake City," by California artist Tom Van Sant. The sculpture was installed in 1964 in the then-new Prudential Federal Savings building.
(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) Crews demolish the old Prudential Federal Savings and Loan Building on Main Street between 100 and 200 South as they make room for the new Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City Monday, May 5, 2014. The Prudential Federal Savings and Loan Building was designed by architect William Pereira who also designed the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.
That building, at 115 S. Main in downtown Salt Lake City, is the last of several to be demolished to make way for the city’s new performing arts center. By the end of last week, only the central steel superstructure from which the entire building once hung remained.
Crews removed "The Gulls" before demolition began and put the birds in storage. City officials want "The Gulls" included in the performing arts center’s future.
"The city’s been very deliberate about saying we want them incorporated," said City Councilman Stan Penfold. "The seagulls are going in the building, someplace."
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"The Gulls" were incorporated in the original design of the Prudential Federal. Van Sant collaborated with the architect, William Pereira, who is best known for designing San Francisco’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid.
"It came to be one of my first large architectural [projects]," Van Sant, now 83, said in a phone interview Friday from his home in Santa Monica, Calif.
Van Sant designed and built the sculpture himself and installed the gulls with the assistance of master welder Timothy E. Smith. It consisted of 100 gulls made from electro-deposited bronze on nickel, which made them lightweight. Van Sant attached the birds to three stainless steel rods, 120 feet long, held in tension between the roof and a sunken garden below street level...
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