A Shadowy Present

In a lot of towns, public art is meant to dazzle and inspire. Not so on trendy 2nd Street in Belmont Shore, where art lies in the shadows--oddly enough, in the shadows of parking meters.

Look down. Most of the parking-meter shadows are real. But here and there, camouflaged among them, are quirky ersatz shadows created by artist Craig Cree Stone.

The lines begin straight, as if cast by the meter poles, only to melt and twist in Dali-esque ways, resulting in an array of surreal shapes on the sidewalk: a raven on a tree limb, a rippling pond, a humongous fork with fish swimming past it, a young girl sitting on a man’s shoulders.

More than 100 of the quirky faux shadows dot the busy, 14-block commercial strip in Long Beach, part of a $50,000 public art project approved two years ago.

Some of the images (fish, a fortress, a steaming cup of coffee) cover boulders on the street median and a few appear on walls. A seven-foot shadow of a heron fills an archway of a brick firehouse; a painted pelican sits atop a high stack of shadow books on the exterior of a library. Most of the artwork spills across the sidewalks, however, chemically stained into the concrete at selected meters on every block.

“It’s different,” commented Steve Richter, 39, an employee at Dodds Book Shop, where a meter outside appears to cast the shadow of a carousel horse. “I don’t think there’s anything like it anywhere else.”

To Richter and many others, the art is certainly offbeat, but too subtle to stir strong emotions. “Well, it’s nice,” Richter said of the sometimes whimsical images. “I don’t think I’ve heard anybody say they come down here for the sidewalk art . . . but more than one person has stopped to look at it. I guess that’s something.”

The subtlety, however, is intentional. Stone’s approach was selected in part to avoid the more passionate debate that often embroils public art, be it the city of Los Angeles’ ill-fated Triforium--the 60-foot, $900,000 winking-lights sculpture that was considered antiquated the day it opened in 1975--or the latest object of ridicule, the 27-foot abstract statue of birds performing on saxophones that was unveiled in September on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The latter piece, financed by a tequila company and dubbed the “Cuervotivity . . . Visions of Art Monument,” was ordered removed last month amid a deluge of complaints that it was ugly and tasteless.

No such outcry has dogged the shadow art.

“I love it,” said Jenny Ross, 20, who works at the Juice Stop, where the stereo on a recent morning rang with acoustic guitar and where a meter outside casts the facsimile shadow of . . . a parking meter. “Belmont Shore is already an artsy place. It brings out more of that.”

Airline pilot Craig Medinis, 36, passed dozens of artsy meter shadows during a jaunt with his son Troy, 2.

“There’s a few interesting ones,” Medinis said, after pushing Troy’s stroller past shadow dogs tethered with shadow leashes and shadow birds landing atop a shadow parking meter. He turned his mirrored glasses toward a shadow image in the shape of a squirting fire hose. “I like this one.”

Pepper Sparks, 48, doesn’t like the shadows at all, not for $50,000. Smoking a cigar outside his Belmont Shore Barber Shop--a narrow, five-chair, barber-pole-on-the-wall establishment dating to 1932--Sparks eyed them with old-fashioned cynicism.

“That’s an awful lot of money for something that, in my opinion, doesn’t do much for the ambience,” he said.

Still, the overall reaction has been favorable, especially among merchants who were struggling just a few years ago, said Jorge Pardo of the Public Corporation for the Arts, a private nonprofit organization that helped business owners select the artist and design.

Financed through (what else?) parking-meter revenues, Stone’s artwork cost about as much as a new traffic light and was one element of a larger, $3-million improvement project that widened sidewalks, added trees and revitalized commerce along 2nd Street, Pardo said.

“It’s subtle. It’s not heavy-handed,” he said of the art, and yet it makes the street memorable. “A friend comes to town, you say, ‘Oh, let me take you to this place.’ ”

Stone, 41, who teaches art and American Indian studies at Cal State Long Beach, said he and four assistants toiled eight months to put all the shadows in place.

The designs pay homage to the modern way of life in Belmont Shore--dining, shopping, sipping coffee--and to what the area used to be: a tidal mud flat occupied by herons, pelicans and Tongva Indians.

In that respect, Stone has helped fashion--as only an artist could--a place of beguiling ambiguity: on one hand a reflection of the present, on the other a shadow of its former self.