Port of San Diego to Dedicate New Public Park

Port of San Diego to Dedicate New Public Park

Tuesday, 18 September 2012 

The Port of San Diego will dedicate its 18th waterfront park, Ruocco Park, at 10 a.m. on Thursday, September 20, 2012.

Located just north of Seaport Village, the park was built at the site of the former Harbor Seafood Mart at the southwest corner of Harbor Drive and Pacific Highway in San Diego. Its opening will bring the total dedicated park space on Port property to 153 acres.

City of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, San Diego Council President Pro Tem Kevin Faulconer, San Diego Councilmember Todd Gloria and San Diego County Supervisor Greg Coxwill join Port Commissioners in dedicating the park. Executives from the San Diego Foundation, who awarded the Port a $3.5 million grant to help pay for the park, will also participate.

Built on time and within budget, the 3.3-acre park features quiet contemplative areas, a variety of trees, benches, picnic tables and a plaza for events or gatherings. It also includes the public artwork, "The Riparium," by local artist Roman de Salvo.

De Salvo's inventive artwork serves as a gateway at the corner of Harbor Drive and Pacific Highway. It includes an abstract network of massive eucalyptus tree branches that span across the park's entrance. The branches are suspended by cables that are anchored to towering masts, reminiscent of sailboats on the bay.

The park is named after Lloyd and Ilse Ruocco. Mr. Ruocco was a prominent San Diego architect and credited with starting the modern architectural movement here. He designed dozens of private homes around the region and worked on several prominent public buildings, including the County Administration Building, San Diego Civic Theater, the Design Center in Hillcrest, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, among others. Mrs. Ruocco was a noted interior decorator and professor of art at San Diego State University.

Port of San Diego Breaks Ground on New Waterfront Park from Port of San Diego on Vimeo.

The couple established a trust more than 25 years ago to create a public park in San Diego that would feature outstanding urban design. The trust is administered by the San Diego Foundation, which awarded the Port the $3.5 million grant from the Ruocco Fund in November 2008.

The Port of San Diego contributed $3.8 million for the park from its Capital Improvement Program. Port funds accommodated construction of a basic park, and partial demolition of the former Harbor Seafood Mart. The Ruocco donation was used to enhance the park's design and provide upgrades such as the garden areas, upgraded hardscape, benches, public art and lighting.

About $1 million from the Ruocco donation will be used to maintain the park's upgrades and the Port will pay for maintenance of the basic park elements.

Ruocco Park is designed by Dennis Otsuji of ONA and Associates, Inc., a San Diego firm. Otsuji has worked on local landscape architecture projects at the Stephen Birch Aquarium and Liberty Station. His design includes many of the elements that the Ruoccos requested when they established the park fund. It was built by Ledcor Construction, Inc.

Along with its parks, the port has created miles of pathways that weave throughout the parks along the water's edge. The Port has also developed public boat launch ramps, boat docks, fishing piers and many other recreational amenities.

About the Port:

The Port of San Diego is the fourth largest of the 11 ports in California. It was created by the state legislature in 1962. Since then, it has invested millions of dollars in public improvements in its five member cities Chula Vista, Coronado, Imperial Beach, National Cityand San Diego.

The port oversees two maritime cargo terminals, two cruise ship terminals, 17 public parks, the Harbor Police Department and the leases of more than 600 tenant and sub tenant businesses around San Diego Bay.

The Port of San Diego is an economic engine, an environmental steward of San Diego Bay and the surrounding tidelands, and a provider of community services and public safety.

The artist's public-art piece illustrates the Port of San Diego's new direction

Roman de Salvo's gateway to the bay

The artist's public-art piece illustrates the Port of San Diego's new direction

By Kinsee Morlan

Roman de Salvo 

Roman de Salvo stands back, looking at the puzzle of tree trunks and large branches he’s laid out across the corner of a rented asphalt parking lot in Poway. The trees have essentially been filleted—cut down the middle with a chainsaw—and spliced back together into a twisting, vein-like pattern. They lay on the ground belly-up, with the wood grain and growth-ring innards beaming with natural beauty.

De Salvo’s trees will eventually be sanded, treated and mounted with the exposed grain face down in a hanging trellis-like sculpture at Ruocco Park, the Port of San Diego’s 18th public park scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. Located on a 3.3-acre lot just north of Seaport Village and designed by landscape architect Dennis Otsuji, the park is being funded through a public-private partnership, with the Port putting in $3.8 million, the Lloyd and Ilse Ruocco Fund covering $3.5 million and half a million coming from developer Doug Manchester, who was required to contribute the money as part of a deal in the 1990s that allowed him to expand the waterfront Hyatt hotel.

“The park basically gives public access to the water,” de Salvo says. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the woes of the bayfront. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to celebrate that access with the work and kind of welcome the city to the water and to the park with a kind of gateway sculpture.”

From the street, the piece may not look like much, de Salvo says, but when people walk through it, they’ll be presented with a beautifully framed view of the bay and park. He got the idea from the park’s namesake, modernist architect Lloyd Ruocco and his wife, artist Ilse Hammon Ruocco, who set aside a trust 25 years ago with the intention of funding a centrally located public park featuring “exceptional urban design.” De Salvo visited some of Lloyd’s buildings and noticed something about their architecture. From the outside, the structures were relatively plain, but inside, the windows and beams thoughtfully framed the outside views and landscape.

“There’s this sort of astonishing thing about experiencing his work,” de Salvo says. “You don’t know you’re being set up like this until you go through the door, and there it is; it’s like the curtains are unveiled on this wondrous situation.”

“From his usage of materials to exploration of site and place, his aesthetic vision and artistic approach very much fit into our new direction,” Wise says. When I first met with de Salvo to talk about his piece for Ruocco Park, the artist was sun-kissed and dirty-handed, busy finishing another outdoor public-art project, a piece he calls “Grape Maze.” It’s a large-scale wooden maze mounted on the outside walls of the museum at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido. Eventually, a grapevine will be trained to work its way through, solving the maze as it grows. The piece was meant to activate the museum’s courtyard, yet the building sits largely unused, save for special events, in part due to budget cuts that paused the museum’s exhibition programming. It’s expected to remain closed through the end of August at least, but funding for “Grape Maze” was already secured, so the piece has to go up now.

It’s ironic, says de Salvo, who imagined the art piece as a fun way to spark conversation and interaction during the museum’s public events.

But unexpected outcomes and added challenges are something de Salvo’s learned to deal with when working in his preferred realm of public art, which can be unpredictable. De Salvo’s first unofficial public piece—a fountain of water that spurted up through a floor drain every time a toilet was flushed and was constructed without permission in a bathroom at UCSD (where de Salvo got his master’s degree in fine art)—lasted unscathed for almost six years. Meanwhile, his 2003 public-art project for the city of San Diego, “Crab Carillion,” an installation of almost 500 chimes on the 25th Street Bridge in Golden Hill, has been hit by a few cars and no longer sings with its intended musical palindrome.

Also, navigating the approval process and politics that surround public-art projects is no easy task, de Salvo says, but he’s learned the art of shepherding his proposals through by making sure he communicates his ideas clearly and infuses  commissions and panels with his enthusiasm.

De Salvo’s represented by Quint Contemporary Art and says he’s happy to do site-specific gallery and museum installations when he’s asked, but he’s absolutely more at home outdoors, famously using subtle, ordinary materials to produce unexpected, sometimes extraordinary outcomes.

“I like everyday stuff in an everyday scenario,” he explains. “People are not going through their everyday lives expecting an encounter with art. So, they’re not necessarily even sure what to make of my work sometimes…. It’s not in the context of art, so the experience of it by the everyday public—they don’t have their guard up, so their response seems more natural to me.”

For de Salvo’s Ruocco Park project, he harvested already dead trees from Sherman Heights and Ramona with the help of an arborist and a crane operator. The medium itself is the ordinary materials de Salvo likes so much, but the way he’s carefully sliced and pieced the trees back together, creating an entirely new, organic composition—that’s where the extraordinary comes in.

On Feb. 10, the Port of San Diego released its first-ever curatorial strategy. Partly due to criticism of its art program in the past—like the “Urban Trees” sculptures, which were always a crapshoot in terms of quality, or the big, schmaltzy “Unconditional Surrender” sailor-kissing-nurse sculpture that’ll be removed at the end of the month—the new policies were put in place to help raise the standards and guide the Port’s public-art policies through 2016. The plan includes specifics, like a new artist-residency program, and lays out a broader goal of focusing on “site-specific, ephemeral and environmental works that respond to the natural geography of the tidelands.”

Even though de Salvo’s piece was commissioned before the new policies were in place, Yvonne Wise, the Port’s director of public art, says it’s precisely the kind of work the Port will look to install in the future.

Joe Ruocco

Voglio murì

Addolorata - Carmine Lantriceni - Avigliano

I’ nun ce ‘a faccio cchiù voglio murì!

Ma tu ‘o ssaie che me staie a dì ?

Pure Gesù tremmaie ‘nnanze a morte

sapenno ‘a sofferenza c’’o spettavo

saglienno ‘ncopp’a croce o juorno doppo.

Ero nu dio, ma malepateva

sulo ‘o penziero d’’a sofferenza doppia

ca l’aspettava per farce nu piacere.

Chiammaie attuorno a isso a gente soia

pe nun se sentì sulo ‘nnanze ‘a porta

‘e nu munno ca isso canusceva

ca ppure le faceva na paura

comme a nuie piccerille l’ommo niro

ca nun è visto maie ma ce crire.

Senza sapè si è overo oppure no

te fa paura e basta comme a mò

c’’o munno nun se sape pecchè tira

jenne ‘o cuntrario e comme avesse j’:

si overo ca sta pe j a fernì

o ce sta tiempo ancora pe campà.

Cert’è ca quanno nasce e quanno muore

è sempe nu dulore ca tu daie

a chi te sta vicine e te vo’ bbene,

te cure e te dà ammore e qualche pena.

Murimmo tutte quante lassa stà,

quann’è ‘o mumento 'un ce sta niente ‘a fa.

Stamme vicino nun avè paura

e sta sicura ca te voglio bbene

pure si ‘e vvote te faccio arraggià.

‘A vita è chesta pur’io aggia murì.

Tieneme astrette ‘e mane, nun m’’e lassà

quanno arrivo ‘o mumento e aggio partì.

Guarde che aria triste me juto a capità

propri’ ogge ca sento ‘o munno ‘ncuollo

e ‘a mano toia nun trova affianco a me.

Che sofferenza è ‘a vita, ‘a morte chi ‘o ssa !

Ostia lido,           19/09/2012      ore 08,00

Inserita nella raccolta "Suspire 'e miezojuorno"

Ruocco and Lundberg show - New York

Ruocco Park Grand Opening 20 september 2012

Rua Antonio Ruocco a San Paolo del Brasile