A humble chair sits empty at the last stop on the new streetcar line in Ybor. It looks old and a little lonely — oddly out of place amid the fresh white concrete and spiffy new shelter.It suits my mournful mood on the day I visit, and I plop down on it.
From a distance, it looks as if it might be made of leather and wood, but it's actually bronze and quite hard. It doesn't offer comfort; it's not meant to. In fact, it's not just a chair, but also a sculpture — a work of art that has a meaning beyond its simple function.
An empty chair symbolizes absence, and this one commemorates two powerful forces in the shaping of Ybor City, forces now absent and still mourned by some. One is the cigarmakers who sat in chairs that looked like this one while they rolled tobacco and listened to lectors read novels, newspapers and radical political treatises. The city's public art committee has scattered these facsimiles along the streetcar route in Ybor City to give us something tangible and lasting to remember them by.
Each chair bears a plaque with a poem written in English, Spanish or Italian — the major languages of old Ybor — by either Silvia Curbelo or Peter Meinke, both poets of national standing who live in this area.
The poem on this particular chair is not for the cigarworkers but for another person who came to Ybor long after they were gone — an architect who worked to preserve the buildings that bear testament to their lives. If not for her and others like her, then blunt-headed bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians would have obliterated more buildings than they did in the name of urban renewal and left the others to rot.
Like this austere little chair, Jan Abell was small and spare and much stronger than she looked. Sitting here, I have to laugh at how appropriate it is as a monument to her. Her friends sometimes complained that there was not one comfortable place to sit in her house. Like many architects, she seemed to view furniture more as sculpture than as an aid to relaxation. She wasn't much for lolling about anyhow and didn't place a terribly high price on creature comforts unless they also had artistic merit.
Someday, there will be no one left who remembers these small details about Jan. They won't know that she died in the prime of her life, when she fell from her horse in the woods. But the little chair and the melancholy poem will still be there, signaling across the generations that someone named Jan Abell was here and that she did something that someone thought was important. That she was dear enough to memorialize in this way.
People who happen upon this small monument even today may not know about Jan — or about Silvia Curbelo, who wrote the poem. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in the 1950s, she came to the United States with her family and has lived in Tampa all her adult life. This is not the first poem she has written for someone who died too young. This small monument reminds me of others as well, three local poets who died before the age of 40, all within a couple of years of each other in the mid-1980s. Gayle Natale, who ran a performance art space in downtown Tampa called Strangers, died of cancer; Renee Joele Ashley committed suicide; and Kelli Baer was murdered.
The whole public art project, which includes other pieces at streetcar stops in Channelside as well, is called "Ode to the Tampa Laborer," and it does almost everything public art should do. First, public art should be conceived specifically for the site it will occupy and relate to that site in a unique way. Among my favorite examples are a sculpture by Doug Hollis in a windy spot in Omaha, Neb., that turns air movement into music, and a multicolor neon strip by Rockne Krebs along a light rail bridge in Miami that paints the nighttime sky above and water below.
Public art also has a greater responsibility to engage viewers than art in museums and galleries. It should invite interaction, like the bronze dance steps embedded in a Seattle sidewalk, or serve a public function like the fish ladder in Grand Rapids, Mich., which helps salmon reach their spawning grounds and provides people a place to watch. Public art can also provide shelter, camouflage ugly public utility facilities, or serve as a landmark, a monument or a city's trademark image.
Clearly the little chair at the end of the line relates to Ybor City, with its references to cigarworkers and an architect who helped preserve their legacy, and its poem by a Cuban American. But it also relates to the site as trolley stop and invites interaction by its placement. You can sit in the chair and wait for the trolley, or just watch the riders come and go. (At least you can at night and in the winter — there is no shade, so it probably isn't very comfortable on a summer day, and the bronze probably reaches skin-searing temperatures in the Florida sun.)
And finally, public art has to mean something. It doesn't necessarily have to mean the same thing to each person. In fact, it's more powerful if you can bring your own experience to it and take something more away from it.
I came here with a fresh load of sorrow and found myself mourning again for Jan, who was my friend, for the anarchists, socialists and communists who argued politics as they rolled cigars — and for three young poets long dead.
Susan F. Edwards can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 122, or at ed@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2003.