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‘Spirit of the Ocean’ Rock Party a Rain and Shine Event
While the rain was still coming down about 1 p.m. Saturday, Chris Scott of Chris Scott Masonry patted the larger of the two side-by-side boulders and said, “This is the one that we hope we will get largest blank out of, and a few smaller blanks as well. We’ll carve them out kind of like slicing the crust off a loaf of bread.”
The two boulders are perched high at La Patera Ranch, and they’ll soon be carved into four or more sandstone blanks up to 18 feet long. They’ll then be trucked down the mountain to become the stones that sculptor Nick Blantern and his team will use to re-create the famous and failing Spirit of the Ocean fountain in front of the arch of the Santa Barbara Courthouse.
Failing because, in Blantern’s words, “they kept flower pots on the top of the sculpture for years, which collected moisture in the stone. Then [once the sculpture started to fail] bad processes were put into place to salvage the stone, which only made it worse.”
Saturday’s event at La Patera Ranch was organized by the Santa Barbara Courthouse Legacy Foundation, a group founded five years ago to help with the preservation and fundraising for the many county courthouse art and architectural pieces. The restoration of the Spirit of the Ocean fountain is the latest in a string of projects that has included the rehabilitation of the Hall of Records, restoration of some of the murals hanging in the courthouse hallways, and the replacement of the double-masted flagpole on the grounds.
More than $40 million in ongoing projects are envisioned for the 80-year-old architectural masterpiece, but one thing at a time. The time has come now to drive $500,000 into the replacement of the very public and very famous fountain.
Failing since the 1950s, the first bad process put into place was to essentially spackle and paint the sculpture. The sandstone was spalling — a process in which relatively thin outer layers of stone lift and flake away from the underlying mass — from exposure to water. It created a leprous appearance on the two figures. The paint and spackle hid the damage and starved the underling stone for air.
It stayed that way for about 20 years before it was decided to bring the sandstone back to light. In the early 1980s, county restoration experts teamed with the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles to remove the paint, fill in the damaged areas of the stone with a conservator’s mortar called yawn, and inject the subsurface gaps where spalling was not yet advanced with concrete.
It was a bandage. The water damage to inaccessible areas eventually became homes for ants and more moisture. The lower portion of the statue — it is built of four stone masses, one on the bottom and three smaller stones on top — received the worst of the effects. Over the intervening years, still more mortar was added to the surface as more cracks appeared and more stone spalled away. By 2008, Robert Ooley, county architect and one of the founding trustees of the Courthouse Legacy Foundation, expressed concern that the stone would fail altogether within months.
The project to restore the fountain began with an analysis of what was already there. Drawings and schematics were developed showing the original and the somewhat larger statue as a result of its added layers. Then, since the building is both a state and federal historic landmark, Interior Department standards for preservation of stone were consulted. Because of the advanced state of decay, many options weren’t available.
The Courthouse Legacy Foundation, in conjunction with the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, opted for the best possible plan. They would replace the existing fountain with an exact replica of the original, using the same basic stone, a sandstone from the Coldwater formation from local sources.
Talking with Scott, a second-generation local stone mason, they contacted stone carver Blantern. After a fruitless hunt among the old sandstone quarries along Refugio Road, where the original stone had come from, Scott and Blantern located the two boulders on La Patera Ranch with the help of landowner Oz Madars. The paved portion of the ranch road slips right past the two stones, making access easy — the road turns to dirt just 200 feet farther.
Madars donated the stones for the project. MarBorg Industries donated transportation of the stones, and Specialty Crane donated its services to move the large stones on and off the trucks.
Sometime this summer, the stones will be transported down the hill and roughed out in Blantern’s workshop. Once they are ready for the more detailed finishing work, the stones will be moved to the courthouse lawn to allow the public to watch and experience the process.
A more detailed essay about the restoration and history of the statue will be posted on the online blog Decomposing Santa Barbara in the coming week.
The Courthouse Legacy Foundation still needs to raise $300,000 to complete the project. Click here to donate.
— Noozhawk contributor David Petry is a local historian, author and photographer. Click here to read his blog, Decomposing Santa Barbara, which focuses on aspects of Santa Barbara history that are disappearing.
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