Santa Barbara crews started work this week to remove a State Street sculpture that has been fenced off for over a year after local business owners complained about panhandling taking place in the area.
The sculpture, known as Crescent Crossing, sits in the 600 block of State Street near the Habit Burger Grill.
Donald Davis was the artist who created the brick sculpture, which was installed in 2002.
Now, the sculpture will be removed and relocated to an area near the Santa Barbara Amtrak Train Station.
In recent years, local businesses had complained that people would aggressively panhandle in the area on State Street, sitting on the bench-like sculpture for hours at a time.
Brent Reichard, co-founder of the Habit, said that customers sitting in the restaurant’s patio, just feet away from the sculpture, would be hassled by transients.
“It was very uncomfortable for families going down there for the weekend,” he said. “People would stay away.”
That problem was helped greatly when a fence was put up around the sculpture, he said.
The sculptor of Crescent Crossing died last year, but had signed off on plans to approve the relocation before his death, according to Nina Johnson, assistant to the Santa Barbara City Administrator.
“At the urgent request of the downtown businesses, especially nearby the sculpture,” the city was working to relocate the sculpture this week, she said.
“Too many transients were sitting on the art, and we wanted to find a more suitable location that wouldn’t be disruptive for the businesses in that area.”
A proposal to relocate the sculpture to the Amtrak train station at 209 State St. was ultimately approved, by a host of city committees as well as the artist himself.
“The city worked with the artist to come up with an agreement to locate the sculpture at the train depot,” she said.
Work is being done now to remove the sculpture from the ground. It will be be stored at the train depot until it can be installed, which will likely be at the end of February.
The sculpture will be temporarily placed near the Moreton Bay Fig Tree on the north side of the station’s parking lot, before it can be installed near the station’s main building.
“We want to move quickly on that,” Johnson said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
