The Flyway Project

Flight Path: The Flyway Project from Albuquerque Public Art on Vimeo.

This is an interesting, but long, video regarding The Flyway Project.

On my most recent visit to Albuquerque, NM, I passed by the location on Coors Road, and turned around for a visit, since it looked so striking. Living in Sacramento, CA, I hadn't heard anything about the piece, and so my initial reaction was "WTF?"

I could tell the piece was assembled from jetty jacks, which the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District has long cabled together for flood control purposes along the Rio Grande River. The jetty jacks hail from a long time ago (Bob Wilson says the 1940's, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are from the 1920's, or even older than that). Jetty jacks can hold the river bank together even through heavy floods. So, it seemed disastrously apropos that just as the number of homes in harm's way in the river valley is increasing that people would rip apart crucial public infrastructure in order to make art. It's very 'New Mexico' to do things like that. And it's all in honor of migrating birds too. Who can simply fly elsewhere if inconvenienced by floods.

Apparently a determination has been made somewhere that, because of flood control projects upstream on the Rio Grande River (like Cochiti Dam) that numerous jetty jacks are obsolete, and thus it is appropriate to convert their angle-iron to artistic purposes. I'm not sure I really believe this. Cochiti Reservoir is silting rapidly (it has a 100-year life span and we are already a third of the way through that) and it's always possible to generate flash floods from tributaries closer to town.

Bob Wilson goes on at some length about the approval process for the project. That approval process can be withering, but it's interesting how anxious Wilson felt about it, since there was apparently no public opposition to the project. And it's interesting how no one apparently brought up the subject of floods. People took it on faith that the determination of jetty-jack obsolescence was accurate.

Well, the city may be more-exposed than ever to flood damage, but in exchange we have handsome things like this project to look at. Seems like a fair trade.