This Rich Beyer sculpture used to live on a rotting log near the playground that used to be across from what used to be the Hugo House in what now is considered Cal Anderson Park. The sculpture lived there for 20 years or so inviting kids to climb on it as much as allowing junkies to puke on it. The cast aluminum held up well. When the reservoir was capped and the astroturf unrolled and the various reflecting pools and teletubby hills were installed the dragon was quietly trucked off into the woods of West Seattle where it now lives near a playground in Lincoln Park and that’s where I saw it last weekend.
You may know Rich Beyer and not even know it because of this "people waiting for the interurban" in Fremont. For me living in the salad days of Capitol Hill just a block away from the dragon I got to know it pretty well before I ever knew the artist’s name. Years later I got to know Mr. Beyer a little bit when he and his wife took me and my girlfriend out to dinner and we discussed his creation of a memorial artwork sculpture for Yianni to be placed under the viaduct. The city was down with it in its initial form but Yianni’s family was not into it and the idea was put away into the archives.
Climbing on this dragon again connected some dots and brought back a lot like olfactory memory or a song that’s connected forever to something yesteryear.
It's 1992 and I'm a daycamp counselor wrangling a whole bunch of other people's kids asking them to please stop beating the shit out of each other and take turns on the dragon.
24 years later I'm repeatedly repeating myself but these kids are mine.
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