Alexander Milne Calder

Taking flight on the Parkway, Alexander Calder's 40-foot sculpture, "Eagle," stands tall outside the Art Museum. Calder's father, Alexander Stirling Calder, designed the Swann Fountain - now immobilized by the drought - on Logan Circle, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, crafted the William Penn statue atop City Hall (background). "Eagle," installed Sunday, is on loan to the city for six months.

I propose there be an Alexander Milne Calder corner at the northwest quadrant of the City Hall Courtyard. This area is just a few steps from the splendid "Races of Man" sculpture located in the north archway. A stairway to Conversation Hall is also nearby. A permanent display of Calder's City Hall work would be placed in this area, including: A life-size replica of the colossal statue of William Penn that stands on top of City Hall. Models and casts representing a few of the hundreds of statues, reliefs and other sculptural embellishments that Calder designed for this wonderful building.

The Eagle is landing tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Eagle is a 40-foot sculpture by Alexander Calder, the Philadelphia-born inventor of the mobile, of which the museum has one of its very own - the 34-foot-long Ghost that hangs in the Great Stair Hall. The Eagle is what Calder called a stabile - a standstill mobile. It is an imposing figure, made of steel, painted bright red. "It's a dynamic work," said Anne D'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive officer of the museum, yesterday.

Who are these weird characters hanging around City Hall? They've been there so long, people hardly notice them - so long that no one is even sure who they all are. We are not talking about hack bureaucrats. We are referring to all those statues and carvings clinging to practically every corner, nook, wall, window frame and entrance of City Hall. All that carving and those figures - animals and humans, nude and clothed, lounging languidly or straining every muscle - are what make City Hall one of the most interesting buildings in America.

In summer 2001, officials of the Philadelphia Museum of Art enthusiastically announced that a rotating exhibit of large Alexander Calder sculptures would be on display along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for at least a dozen years. The Pew Charitable Trusts made the long-term - although definitely temporary - exhibit possible with a grant of $5 million. The museum and the Calder Foundation, a New York family-based group that owns hundreds of Calder works, planned "to install 10 to 15 sculptures on a rotating basis over an initial 12-year period beginning in 2001," the museum reported in a statement in July that year.

Pitting Philadelphia against New York is rarely fun for locals - especially when the game is arts and culture. Our star slugger may be the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but the bench includes the Mummers Museum and a medical museum that boasts a dead man's enormous colon. This versus the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (and, coming soon, the Museum of Sex). It's hard to like those odds. But sometimes this city can have the home-team advantage - and the advantage of solicitude.

No bricks and mortar yet, but the plan to build a museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to display the works of internationally celebrated sculptor Alexander Calder got a major push yesterday with the naming of Japanese architect Tadao Ando to design the building. Ando, from Osaka, Japan, won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1995. At a City Hall ceremony, Ando said he was honored to be chosen to create a home for the works of "the greatest artist of the 20th century.

Billy Penn deserves his party next week, considering that he never had one back in November 1894 when he was put atop the City Hall tower. The commission overseeing the building of City Hall felt it was "inexpedient" to spend any money on a ceremony because it was short on funds. The city councilmen refused to help out by covering the costs, estimated at $5,000, because they were feuding with the commission. And everyone was unhappy with the slow progress on City Hall - work began in 1871 and did not finish officially until 1901.

At a small reception high atop Centre Square, with a sculpture-bedecked City Hall tower seeming almost within touching distance outside, Mayor Street yesterday formally acknowledged the end of a major city conservation project. After only 3 1/2 years, the great Alexander Milne Calder sculptures - the eagles, the Native Americans, the Swedish settlers - ringing the hall's tower have been cleaned, repaired and restored. "Restoration is a very detailed and specific process that actually brings these sculptures back to their original form and original condition," Street said, adding that a new City Hall lighting project will be unveiled in the spring.

Whipped by wind and dumped on by birds for nearly 90 years, the gargoyles that stare in stony silence from atop City Hall need some tender loving care. Feel a tear coming to your eye? Then how about adopting a gargoyle? Don't laugh - someone may ask you to do just that. The 21st Century League, a coalition of community and business leaders, yesterday officially announced that it is joining forces with Mayor Goode's City Hall Committee to begin the long, expensive process of restoring City Hall's dignity.

The grand train depot at Broad and Filbert bustled with travelers. When these commuters and visitors exited the station, they found themselves overwhelmed by the smells and sounds of the city. The air in 1879 was thick with a mix of horse manure, cooking food, and coal and steel smoke. It rang with the calls of a dozen newsboys hawking their wares, the bangs of hammers, and the shouts of construction workers at nearby Penn Square. Steps from the busy rail terminal, the world's tallest building was rising.

The grand train depot at Broad and Filbert bustled with travelers. When these commuters and visitors exited the station, they found themselves overwhelmed by the smells and sounds of the city. The air in 1879 was thick with a mix of horse manure, cooking food, and coal and steel smoke. It rang with the calls of a dozen newsboys hawking their wares, the bangs of hammers, and the shouts of construction workers at nearby Penn Square. Steps from the busy rail terminal, the world's tallest building was rising.

In summer 2001, officials of the Philadelphia Museum of Art enthusiastically announced that a rotating exhibit of large Alexander Calder sculptures would be on display along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for at least a dozen years. The Pew Charitable Trusts made the long-term - although definitely temporary - exhibit possible with a grant of $5 million. The museum and the Calder Foundation, a New York family-based group that owns hundreds of Calder works, planned "to install 10 to 15 sculptures on a rotating basis over an initial 12-year period beginning in 2001," the museum reported in a statement in July that year.

At a small reception high atop Centre Square, with a sculpture-bedecked City Hall tower seeming almost within touching distance outside, Mayor Street yesterday formally acknowledged the end of a major city conservation project. After only 3 1/2 years, the great Alexander Milne Calder sculptures - the eagles, the Native Americans, the Swedish settlers - ringing the hall's tower have been cleaned, repaired and restored. "Restoration is a very detailed and specific process that actually brings these sculptures back to their original form and original condition," Street said, adding that a new City Hall lighting project will be unveiled in the spring.

Some people plant tomatoes or build swimming-pool decks. Andrzej Dajnowski's summer project is to remove 100 years of bird droppings and grime from eight giant statues that circle the Philadelphia City Hall tower, just below the most famous face there, that of William Penn. Dajnowski isn't using a massive pressure cleaner, though. And dismiss visions of an enormous sponge. "That's why I bought a laser," he said Thursday, as an outside freight-like elevator lurched 400 feet into the sky. "Two of them.

City Hall is getting lit. Not to worry. It's planned. Beginning with a ceremony at 6 tonight, for the first time in its century-plus history, the entire exterior of City Hall will be flooded with light at night. Every nook and cranny. Every decorative frieze. Every sculpture from the top of William Penn's hat to the bottom of his 510-foot tower-pedestal. The whole surreal mix of allegory and decoration and stone, marble and metal will be bathed in a halogen glow. "City Hall should be exuberant," said Paul Levy, head of the Center City District, the private service organization that organized the effort.

The proposed Calder Museum, a major component of Philadelphia's rejuvenated Benjamin Franklin Parkway and potential neighbor of a relocated Barnes Foundation, is in danger of stalling because organizers have been unable to work out the terms for art loans with the sculptor's family. "There are no commitments, and without commitments, we can't go forward," said H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, the Philadelphia-area philanthropist who made the first substantial pledge to get the $70 million Calder Museum project started.

At 11:15 yesterday morning, Kent Diebolt slipped into his office - about 400 feet above City Hall courtyard. With ropes and harness for anchors and icy winds whipping continuously, Diebolt slipped inside a hollow, 12-ton sculpture of a woman and child set high up on City Hall tower. Just to take a look, of course. His colleague Mike Gilbert did some looking, too, astride a 7,000-pound bronze eagle facing south toward the Navy Yard, the Delaware River and beyond. In the wintery light, legs wrapped about the eagle's neck, city stretched below, Gilbert seemed an orange-hatted Sinbad soaring aboard a fierce, mottled roc. Gilbert and Diebolt are working on the initial phase of a major conservation project announced by the city yesterday - a $1.9 million effort to restore the eight monumental sculptures set on the tower below the boots of William Penn and above the great clock faces.

No bricks and mortar yet, but the plan to build a museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to display the works of internationally celebrated sculptor Alexander Calder got a major push yesterday with the naming of Japanese architect Tadao Ando to design the building. Ando, from Osaka, Japan, won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1995. At a City Hall ceremony, Ando said he was honored to be chosen to create a home for the works of "the greatest artist of the 20th century.

The mammoth orange Eagle that landed gloriously on the east terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art nearly a year ago is about to leave its perch. Alexander Calder's 39-foot-high steel sculpture, which has become a prominent landmark in front of the museum, has been sold to the Seattle Art Museum. That museum announced the acquisition yesterday. The sculpture was installed on the terrace in early August as a six-month loan to the city from its private owner, who remains unidentified.