Release the kraken! Here’s why a Tacoma sculpture has been imprisoned for six years

Nearly six years after it was installed, a $250,000 octopus sculpture meant to welcome visitors to downtown Tacoma still hasn’t been let out of its cage.

“Gertie’s Ghost” was installed in early 2019 by Sound Transit — part of its 1 percent for art program — at South Tacoma Way and Pacific Avenue in Tacoma. Its 12-foot-tall steel tentacles erupt from the earth in a grassy space adjacent to the Pacific Avenue train bridge.

The fenced-off sculpture adds to a less than picture perfect collection of sights along Pacific Avenue at the southern end of downtown. A graffiti-covered and fenced-off former Jack in the Box sits just on the other side of the bridge, and unloved Pugnetti Park decays at state Route 509.

So, why hasn’t the sculpture been freed from its cyclone fence prison?

Who fenced it off?

According to Sound Transit spokesperson David Jackson, the agency paid for the fencing as part of a contract with the city of Tacoma.

“For the time being, we are keeping the fence in place for safety and maintenance reasons but plan to revisit options with our partners at the city,” he said in a statement to The News Tribune on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the city said fencing needs to stay up to protect the sculpture along with approximately 16 quaking aspen trees planted in 2020, which are in their establishment period, according to city spokesperson Maria Lee.

“They will continue to assess the area, but for now, the fence will remain in place,” Lee said. The city could not offer a timeline for the fence’s removal.

The trees are located to either side of the sculpture, which is set in a field of stone. The aspens are meant to frame the sculpture.

While the sculpture is in a bed of uncomfortable rocks, it’s surrounded by a grassy expanse. A bench and bike rack is nearby, also fenced off.

Some 1,500 feet up South Tacoma Way, a large homeless encampment has been erected.

Artists

The 40,000-pound sculpture was conceived and built by two Richmond, California-based large-scale installation artists, Sean Orlando and Dave Shulman of Engineered Artworks.

“We always say we’d like people to love it, obviously,” Orlando said in 2019. “But we wouldn’t mind it if they hated it. As long as they have a strong emotion about it. That’s why we make art.”

The inspiration for the multi-tentacled beast came from Tacoma history, real and imagined.

First, there’s Galloping Gertie’s famous 1940 plunge into the depths of Puget Sound, and then there’s a local legend.

“We were enamored with the story of the giant octopus that lives in the wreckage of the bridge,” Shulman said in 2019. “We kind of fused all of those things together to try and build something that was evocative of an old railroad trestle but had the tapering lines and organic curves of an octopus’s tentacles.”

Orlando and Shulman did not return several requests for comment for this story.

Gateway art

In 2019, Barbara Luecke, the deputy director for public art at Sound Transit, said the sculpture would serve as an entry to downtown Tacoma, which now has the train bridge as a demarcation.

“This time it really worked out as a gateway because there’s a real logic to going under that portal of the new track into downtown Tacoma,” she said in 2019.

Creation of the bridge was controversial, with some protesting its construction as an unsightly barrier.

Luecke did not return a request for comment for this story.