For Artist, Sewer Site Flush With Possibility

For all his years as a sanitation worker, here is a sight that “The Honeymooners’ ” Ed Norton never could have imagined: Art! Art at the sewer plant! “What’s next, Ralphie-boy?” he might have asked, “Picasso in the pipes?”

Probably not. But in Ventura, the dirt paths and quiet lagoons at the seaside waste-water treatment plant are on the verge of an aesthetic make-over that could cost as much as $700,000. The new look comes courtesy of an ordinance requiring developers of shopping centers, subdivisions, and even sewage plants to set aside 2% of a project’s cost for public art.

While some residents complain about this unusual use of tax dollars, Lorna Jordan, the Seattle artist who won the contract, insists she can win the skeptics over. After all, her Waterworks Gardens at a sewage treatment plant serving the Seattle area has not only won national design awards, but also drawn couples who have chosen it as a uniquely romantic spot for their weddings.

“Initially people had the same reaction,” Jordan said. “It’s like giggling in class--but when the project came out, there was a real turnaround.”

The project at the sewage plant next to Ventura Harbor is to be completed by the summer of 2004, but it will be months before the 47-year-old artist and her team--a landscape architect, an environmental planner and an environmental scientist--settle on a design.

Before they do, they will hold a series of public meetings, but whether they can appease the critics--one of them likened an infusion of art at the plant to “putting lipstick on a pig”--is anyone’s guess. Still, it’s clear that Jordan’s work at the East Division Reclamation Plant in Renton, Wash., has left at least some people there flushed with pride.

Five years ago, Jordan completed Waterworks Gardens--a lush, eight-acre maze of ponds and waterfalls punctuated by meandering terra cotta-colored paths and Stonehenge-like columns. Today, it’s a strollers’ haven and ordinarily odor-free, despite its location next to the county sewer plant 20 minutes from downtown Seattle.

“You can go there and meditate,” said Margaret Feaster, a retired teacher who brings out-of-town guests to the site. “It was just a barren field, and now it’s so thoroughly beautiful, with all kinds of aquatic plants, cedar trees, willows, blackberries. I’ve never seen such huge yellow lilies!”

Customers waiting for their cars to be serviced wander in from an automotive shop run by Feaster’s son. At lunch hour, workers from offices across the street amble over to relax. Joggers and bikers on an adjacent path detour into the gardens for a change of pace.

“It’s got a fabulous walkway trail going through a very well-designed layout,” said Jesse Tanner, Renton’s mayor. “If the odor-scrubbers are working right, it’s a very pleasant place.”

When Jordan signed on, sanitation officials anticipated only a sculpture outside the administration building and some trees to hide the treatment plant’s concrete structures. They weren’t prepared for a series of garden-like grottoes loosely inspired by the grounds of a 16th century Italian villa.

“I wanted to find a way for people to connect to the mysteries of water,” Jordan said. “There was something more profound to be experienced here.”

The generally unappetizing subject of sewage processing needn’t be gross, Jordan felt.

“I think treatment plants are really interesting places,” she said. “They’re like little cities.”

A graduate in history from the University of Virginia, Jordan also studied art at the University of Washington and has earned her living as an artist since the mid-1980s. As she conceived of Waterworks Gardens, she took university classes in bioengineering, immersed herself in landscape architecture and trod around marshes with a wetlands biologist.

Even so, skepticism about her plans ran high. Jordan had been primarily a satirical “installation” artist, given to such materials as plastic trees and computer-controlled eggbeaters. In addition, although Seattle had been a pioneer in public-art funding, nobody was sure how residents would take to spending more than $1 million gussying up the sewer plant.

“It was a real risk,” said Bill Burwell, the plant’s now-retired operations manager. “We didn’t know how the media would treat us. We didn’t know if the community would think we were spending money wisely.”

Some of Jordan’s initial ideas were clunkers. A piece of fire-breathing artwork using the plant’s methane gas would have violated pollution laws. Artistic curls of fog from a machine placed on a hillside above the plant would have inadvertently created “the world’s largest slug farm,” Burwell said. Plant employees disliked the idea so much they circulated a protest petition.

After five years, Jordan and her team had created a kind of designer wetlands, an artful series of ponds for storm-water runoff, a habitat for all kinds of aquatic birds as well as lunchtime strollers. It earned awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Environmental Design Research Assn., as well as an appointment for Jordan as the first artist-in-residence for Seattle’s utility system.

In Ventura, the sewer plant--known formally as the Ventura Water Reclamation Facility--doesn’t get many visitors. Bird-watchers occasionally walk the paths around the plant’s three ponds, keeping an eye on the snowy egrets and great blue herons that call them home. Hidden behind fences topped with barbed wire, the ponds hold treated effluent from which chlorine must settle before the water is released into the Santa Clara River.

One recent afternoon, the settling ponds looked like fishing holes in New England, complete with a decaying old dinghy lodged on a muddy shore. There was no smell except the salt breeze off the ocean. City officials say that is the way it always is, except when certain equipment is shut down for repair.

“You wouldn’t know there’s a sewer plant anywhere near the place,” said Donald Davis, the city’s sanitation superintendent. “You’d have to be inside one of the pump stations to know it.”

Davis, an avid birder, hopes Jordan and her crew can improve the habitat at the plant.

Other than that, he said he is trying to steer clear of the artistic process and not picture what this old salt marsh might become.

At this point, Jordan says the same thing. She has walked the paths a few times and studied aerial photos, but what she knows for sure is only her next step.

“We have to listen to the community,” she said, “and listen to the site.”