The hands of the Tyler Davidson Fountain show how Cincinnati could be a better place to live. They reach out with dignity. Some hands seek help. Others give comfort. None is ignored.

        “There's a lot of reaching out going on with the figures on the fountain,” photographer Doreen LaRue said. “The people of Cincinnati need to mimic that behavior.

        “We must reach out and help each other.”

        Makes perfect sense to me. Since the April riots, fists raised in anger, hands calling for boycotts, have gotten us nowhere.

        Everyone needs to reach out and join hands. Put an end to the city's strife.

View from Mount Adams
        Doreen — a bohemian blonde in a black beret — shared her thoughts on curing Cincinnati's ills while standing in Visionary Art in Action, the art gallery she co-owns in Mount Adams.

        As she spoke, she looked at her favorite photo of the fountain, a close-up she took of Turtle Joe's right hand.

        The photograph belongs to her stunning series of 12 note cards. Each card features a sepia-toned photograph — suitable for framing — of a piece of the fountain.

        In one photo, the figure of a man thrusts out his chest to savor a cooling spray of water. In another, a child — seen through a snowlike veil of mist — straps on an ice skate. Yet another shot whimsically concentrates on a figure's navel.

        Each image beautifully showcases one portion of the fountain. Yet, her favorite — and mine, too — remains Turtle Joe's right hand.

        Showing pearl-sized droplets of water clinging to curled bronze fingers, the photo focuses exclusively on the glistening hand of a turtle-riding boy.

        The figure sits atop one of four drinking fountains ringing the base of the city's most famous man-made source of water.

City's likeness

        Turtle Joe and the Tyler Davidson Fountain have reached out to Doreen for as long as she can remember. As a child growing up in Hyde Park, her annual birthday treat was to go downtown to see the fountain.

        After she left town in 1982 to join the Air Force and see the world, she marked every homecoming by visiting the fountain. When she came back to Cincinnati for good in 1998, she didn't feel she was home until she saw the fountain.

        “That fountain,” she told me, “has always been my home base.”

        After the riots, Doreen looked to the fountain for a solution to the city's problems. She found it in the hands.

        “I saw the fountain being greater than the sum of its parts,” she said.

        “That's the way I look at the city. The riots are just one part, an ugly problem.

        “Other parts of the city are beautiful. They could solve the problem if the people reach out to each other — as the figures do.”

        Looking at the fountain from that point of view, she started taking the photos that became her series of note cards.

        The pictures aren't just images of the fountain's parts. They make up a portrait of what could bring peace to Cincinnati, hands reaching out, helping one another.

        Columnist Cliff Radel can be reached at (513) 768-8379; fax 768-8340.

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