Broad Street Bombardiers
by Madeline Carol

In 1938 a great tornado destroyed most trees in Washington Park by City Hall. When City Fathers had more trees planted in 1939, they had little idea that the trees would become irresistibly attractive to birds -- yellow-crowned night herons -- whose natural habitats were mudflats, swamps, and small islands. But a half century later another natural disaster, Hurricane Hugo, deforested many of the herons' usual nesting areas; and birds began to take up residence in Washington Park in ever increasing numbers.

In the years before Hugo, Washington Park had become a focus of the Spoleto Festival for local artists to exhibit their paintings on the shaded lawns. The height of the herons' nesting season -- March to May -- coincides with the latter May, early June arts event of Spoleto. Conflict developed. Swelling numbers of birds, discharged torrents of particularly pungent droppings upon art, artists, and art lovers.

Schemes entertained to discourage the herons, in part or whole, included plastic owls in trees, nets in trees, and pruning the trees. Some plastic owls were hung, but with no visible effect upon the nesters.

Controversy about disturbing the birds raged, with most sentiment in favor of not displacing the herons and letting artists set up in other areas.

Another chapter we might say in Charleston's history -- enacted in a park that testifies to so much of that history: a City Hall originally built as a Bank of the United States across the street from South Carolina's first legislative building -- the Fireproof Building, the first of its kind designed by America's first professional architect, Charlestonian's Robert Mills -- a former outdoors repository of the 1770 William Pitt bust(now housed indoors), the first statue of a public figure erected in the colonial era -- a monument to Andrew Jackson's mother who died nursingothers during a Charleston epidemic - a monument to Henry Timrod, "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy" -- the imposing granite shaft of a confederate memorial -- and testaments of others who left their mark on Charleston. And now the birds who are literally and figuratively leaving theirs.

Madeline Carol, an artist known for her ventures into unusual aspects of Charleston history, brings about an accommodation of the recent conflict between nature and the arts in "Broad Street Bombardiers." A heron is shown with three nearly camouflaged babies, nesting serenely in a setting of Charleston antiquity, oblivious to the plastic owl glaring down form above. Finely detailed on one hand to capture the forms of the Charleston roof lines and the yellow-crowned heron, yet impressionistic enough to communicate artistic feeling and to allow the configurations of owl forms in the foliage - Madeline Carol's "Broad Street Bombardiers" achieves an artistic balance of styles that reflects a balance between nature and man.

Madeline Carol, Capturing the Spirits
Art Gallery