Garden Celebrates School’s Recovery From ’94 Temblor

Two months after the deadly 1994 Northridge earthquake, artist Marjorie Berkson Sievers and landscape architect Paul Lewis put on hard hats and toured the wreckage of Cal State Northridge.

It was in one of the collapsed parking lots that they found the rubble they needed to build a memorial.

Named after a popular professor at the university who died of breast cancer in 1989, the Lauretta Wasserstein Earthquake Sculpture Garden was unveiled Sunday on a gentle slope in front of the school cafeteria before a crowd of 100 guests.

There, visitors strolled around concrete columns and a staircase that jutted out of the soil. Native grasses weave through the walkways, which are both circular and irregular, representing seismic rings. Twisted wire that once served as railing is now mimicked by deep-green reeds.

“The earthquake doesn’t bring back good memories, but this will,” said Pamela Gelman, surveying the memorial. Gelman said her Tarzana home was badly damaged in the quake and she now lives in Westwood.

Sievers, her own home battered by the 6.7-magnitude temblor, was inspired to combine the rubble and vegetation when she noticed ivy creeping into her Northridge home through cracks in her bathroom wall. “It dawned on me that nature was taking over,” said Sievers, who got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at the school. “If left alone, it would be beautiful.”

Lewis, who remembers being shaken out of bed by the earthquake, already has enjoyed watching photography students capture the garden’s shadows and shapes. He envisions other students performing spoken word and poetry on the grass.

Sandy Klasky organized the fund-raising for the project and said it was important for the memorial to bring the community together. She said they could share in remembering the heartache caused by the quake. “It was pretty horrible,” she said. “There was no place to rest. Both your home and work were disrupted.”

Three different campus sites were proposed for the garden and rejected because the university, which sustained $400 million in damage, was constantly undergoing construction changes. It took until last year for the project to reach the needed $200,000 in funding, thanks mainly to the sizable donation provided by the Wasserstein family.

President Jolene Koester said the quake had a profound effect on the school’s day-to-day operations, and it was fitting that the garden be placed on the campus.

“This commemorates the human spirit that brought the university back,” she said.