A year-long dispute over relocating the Sparks Street bear statue for a Stanley Cup monument has finally been resolved.
After nearly a year of negotiations, the bitter dispute over a well-known Centretown statue has been resolved.
Tamaya Garner, the widow of acclaimed sculptor Bruce Garner, came to an agreement with the City of Ottawa last week over the relocation of her late husband’s statue of a bear on the Sparks Street Mall.
The statue, known as “Territorial Prerogative,” features a bronze bear devouring a fish and has been located at the intersection of Sparks and Elgin streets for two decades.
“I have decided on a better location that will put all of the elements of the statue back together in a safer spot,” Garner says.
Where exactly the statue will go, however, remains to be seen.
“I would rather wait until everyone signs on the dotted line, shall we say, before I give away anything more,” says Garner.
The dispute erupted last March when Garner learned that the city had decided to move her husband’s statue to another location in order to make room for a new Stanley Cup monument.
Unfortunately, Garner hadn’t been informed of the move. Five months after her husband’s death, she was caught off-guard.
“The man had only been dead for a few months and they were already trying to push his work out of the way,” says Garner.
The error, it turned out, was a simple case of miscommunication. Sparks Street Mall authorities had been under the impression that Garner had been notified.
Garner lashed out, saying that she was “absolutely furious” that her husband “would not approve at all” and that she “would not take it lying down.”
Garner began a petition to block the move, though she claimed she was not against the new monument.
Her stance kicked off a turf war over the Sparks Street real estate and sharply divided Centretown residents, with many in the arts community rallying behind Garner.
The decision of where to place the new monument was made by the City of Ottawa, but the group spearheading the hockey statue, known as the Lord Stanley Memorial Monument Inc., received much of the backlash.
“This was not something we ever intended to happen,” says George Hunter, board member of the Lord Stanley group.
“Our group had hoped to steer clear of such a situation altogether,” Hunter says.
In fact, according to Hunter, the Sparks Street location was not even the group’s first choice.
“The initial plan was for the monument to be positioned at the intersection of Rideau and Sussex,” Hunter says.
However, the Rideau-Sussex location fell under dual jurisdiction of the National Capital Commission and City of Ottawa and was rejected over prolonged bureaucratic wrangling.
In an attempt to settle the dispute, the Sparks Street Mall Authority proposed that the statue be moved further down the outdoor mall, where it would become part of a new display called Artist Alley.
But Garner was not happy with the offer, and she promptly rejected it.
The city reached out again a few months later, with a greater list of prominent sites with which the statue could be relocated.
More negotiation followed and at last Garner agreed.
The dispute has been resolved, but substantial challenges remain ahead for the Lord Stanley group.
Last October, the hefty budget for the proposed monument was slashed from $7 million to $4.5 million.
The $2.5-million cut was intended to attract more sponsors to the project.
“We are still in the process of securing corporate funding,” says Paul Kitchen, hockey historian and originator of the Stanley Cup project.
“But it is proving to be a time-consuming exercise,” Kitchen says.
Once the issue of funding is taken care of, the group will hold an international design competition to decide what the monument should look like.
Kitchen remains confident that the statue will be ready for the 2017 unveiling, a date set to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Hockey League.