ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
A Play Us a Tune piano on Main Street in Peabody across from the public library.
Public art is a magnet for conversation, civic pride and, as Peabody residents demonstrated this week, outrage over vandalism.
Police said vandals last weekend smashed one of four public pianos set up around the city. Local leaders quickly condemned the destruction and residents made it clear they support the “Play Us A Tune” public art project by offering to donate pianos for public display.
Peabody is not the only community where public art stirs public pride and passion. It helped redefine Lynn’s Central Square with photographs displayed under the commuter rail tracks melding bygone images of Lynn with modern photos. A giant mosaic stretching from Central Square to Washington Street filled with faces converted a dark, spooky alley paralleling the tracks into an outdoor art gallery.
Public art is traditionally rooted in monuments and embodied by carved stone salutes to pivotal historical events and important people. Lynn monuments to residents who made the ultimate sacrifice during wartime dot Central Square and Pine Grove Cemetery. Anti-slavery champion Frederick Douglass is honored on Lynn Common and inventor Jan Matzeliger’s name is immortalized on the Green Street bridge.
Nahant artisan Reno Pisano’s stone tribute to Mary Baker Eddy on Oxford Street celebrates the religious thinker and the slip-and-fall accident that led to Lynn figuring prominently in her writing. Two of Lynn’s prominent pieces of public art occasionally prompt speculation about their meaning and their location.
The train sculpture on North Shore Community College faces the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s commuter rail garage while the thinker sitting on a stack of books gazes across Broad Street to the college.
It is interesting to speculate about public art works never erected in the city. Lynn has welcomed generation after generation of immigrants but no sculpture or painting depicting their bravery graces a public location in the city.
Courageous firefighters fought to control the conflagration that consumed downtown buildings in 1981 but no tribute to their prowess is to be found on Broad Street. Other examples are easy to name but perhaps the most fitting tribute yet to be erected is a statue of former Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas W. McGee.
A champion for local residents who helped make the college a reality, McGee’s likeness would be a great centerpiece for the courtyard taking shape as part of the college’s ongoing construction.
