Two Tacoma lions get nose jobs after vandal smashes iconic Wright Park cats
Don’t mess with Tacoma’s cats.
That’s the message the city’s lion lovers are sending after someone knocked off the noses of the two stone cats that guard the entrance to Wright Park.
Sometime in late April, passers-by noticed the white-washed lions at Sixth and South Yakima avenues were missing their noses.
The cats are more than mere decoration. They are approximately 130 years old and hold in their paws history from Tacoma’s earliest days, including a tale of love lost.
After local historian Michael Sullivan posted about the damage on social media, the community was galvanized. Enough money was raised to hire a Tacoma artist who has her own history with Wright Park’s injured stone denizens.
Cats rich in history
The lions came to Tacoma courtesy of a city fat cat, Clinton Ferry, one of the early settlers who wore the nickname, The Duke of Tacoma.
“He later in life fell in love with this younger woman,” Sullivan said. “They both had an interest in the fine arts.”
In 1889, Ferry and his young bride traveled to the Paris Exposition and went on a Grand Tour of Europe, the fashionable thing for the wealthy to do in the late 1800s.
“He purchased copies of the great sculptures of Europe and had them shipped back here,” Sullivan said.
Ferry returned with the pair of lions, among other sculptures, but not with his wife. She had run off with her French teacher while still in Paris.
Ferry’s art collection ended up at the Ferry Museum, which eventually became part of the Washington State Historical Society.
The two lions are copies of statues in Brussels, Sullivan said. They are made from cast stone, a process that simulates cut stone. The lions were cast in a mold.
Early in its history, Yakima Avenue went through the park instead of stopping at Sixth Avenue as it does now, Sullivan said. The lions flanked the street.
Struck in the night
Sometime between April 25-27, both lions were struck by a vandal or vandals.
“It looks like somebody had an aluminum baseball bat or something with paint on it,” Sullivan said.
The attack was weeks before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and unrelated to the days of unrest that have followed his killing.
The response to Sullivan’s Facebook post was immediate.
“It was amazing,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds (of responses).”
Because Metro Parks Tacoma is facing a projected $13 million revenue shortfall from COVID-19 impacts, it had to postpone restoration work on the lions, said spokeswoman Nancy Johnson.
That’s when the public stepped forward.
Sullivan acknowledged the community faces bigger issues than missing noses.
“This is a minor thing compared to the civil rights issue we’re going through,” he said. But, he speculates, there’s a certain satisfaction in being able to repair damage to the city’s character, no matter how small.
“I think people feel better about the city,” he said.
Layer by layer
Lynn Di Nino is no stranger to fixing vandalized statues. When Metro Parks uncovered the head and other parts of the “Fisherman’s Daughter” statue in Wright Park’s lake, she was hired to reassemble the statue.
Di Nino is currently working in plastic but went through a long concrete period in her work that made her an expert in the medium.
“There isn’t a lot of people around who know how to use that stuff,” she said.
Although the nose parts had been collected, there was no putting them back together, Di Nino said.
“I had to do the noses from scratch,” she said.
Di Nino built up the lion’s new noses half-inch layer by half-inch layer.
It’s a painstaking process that requires her to visit the lions nearly every day. She expects to be finished this week.
Metro Parks will paint the completed statues.
“People are so grateful,” Di Nino said of passersby.
But not so much the first day she worked on the project. Dozens of people walked and jogged by without saying a word. For a moment, she thought no one cared.
“Pretty soon, a cop comes tearing up to park next to me,” Di Nino said. “He gets out of the car with his hand on his hip. I was so happy to see him. I thought, thank God somebody cares about this.”
Somebody did care, just not the way Di Nino expected. Someone had called the police to report a vandal.
