By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HYDE PARK - City officials and Hyde Park residents agreed: the brick sculpture at Erie and Madison avenues - an East Hyde Park landmark for 15 years - must go.

Beyond that, little about the future of the site formerly known as the "Mudhole" was decided Tuesday night.

Some want to see the sculpture - called Double Star: Antares, by artist Athena Tacha - replicated brick-by-brick at the same spot. Estimated cost: up to $110,000.

Others want to leave their options open: another artwork, a fountain - maybe a gazebo.

All those options were debated at a meeting of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Council Tuesday night. By the end of the night, the council agreed to appoint an independent sculpture committee to look at alternatives.

Antares, named after the double star discovered by the Mount Lookout Observatory, is a series of 26 brick walls. City building inspectors have condemned it, and because it sits on a city playground, the Cincinnati Recreation Commission will quickly take action to fence it off from the public, director James R. Garges said.

Building inspectors say the sculpture is becoming unstable because of a faulty design and deterioration, and the Cincinnati Recreation Commission had proposed bulldozing it. The work looks like a maze of random brick walls from the street. From above, it's designed to look like two stars - one imploding and one exploding, the artist said.

City officials and the artist still disagree on who is to blame for the sculpture's disrepair. Tacha said the city never spent money to maintain it. The city says the sculpture was designed poorly.

But with better construction and better materials available today, the sculpture could be replicated - at a cost.

Using city labor and paying prevailing wage, it would cost $110,000, Garges said. With donated labor, it could get cheaper.

The city could contribute up to $30,000 - the original cost of the sculpture - to the project. Tacha has told Hyde Park leaders she would donate her time, expenses and $5,000.

But Councilman Jim Tarbell said it would be a political battle to get anything more from the city. Tarbell, chairman of the Arts & Culture Committee, oversees $2.2 million in capital arts spending, most of which goes to large performing-arts venues.

"Public sculpture is not so easy for some of my colleagues to defend and support," Tarbell said.

Indeed, Antares is at the forefront of an emerging debate about the value of public art.

"The city has a history of putting sculpture in the city and then having it disappear and go someplace else," said sculptor Stewart Goldman. Most notably, Cincinnati Story, a George Sugarman sculpture in front of the Chiquita Building downtown, was sent to Pyramid Hill in Hamilton.

But not everyone thinks a big, obtrusive sculpture is the best use of the land.

Ken Segal, owner of the Ravenswood Apartments building on Erie Avenue, said he'd like to see a gazebo and bandstand there - the centerpiece of the flourishing district he likes to call "the East Village of Hyde Park."

"The use of that space is different than when the sculpture was built," he said. "It should serve a greater purpose than a pile of bricks."

But Bob McKeever, a member of the neighborhood council, said replacing the sculpture with something else would send the wrong message to artists.

"We're not going to get any artists interested in bringing their pieces to Cincinnati if after 10 or 15 years they're shipped off to Hamilton or torn down," he said. "We need to send a message to the artistic community that we care about the artist as well as the art."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com