Humpty sculpture back together again

Humpty Dumpty sat on Tejon Street.
Humpty Dumpty some ruffians did meet.
Not all the king's horses nor all the king's men,
but some foundry employees put Humpty together again.

In Colorado Springs, Humpty Dumpty has suffered much more than a great fall.

The sculpture on North Tejon Street has been stolen, replaced, dented, urinated on, vandalized with peanut butter and cigarettes and finally, last fall, beaten so badly with a metal ob- ject he was taken down.

"I don't know what he's ever done. He was a good egg," said Beth Kosley, executive director of the Downtown Partnership, which sponsors downtown sculpture, including Humpty Dumpty.

You might say Wednesday was a storybook ending for the most abused piece of downtown art.

After several months of repair, the bronze sculpture was placed atop a wall outside the Pikes Peak Center on South Cascade Avenue.

Officials hope the 200-pound, 3-foot-tall sculpture will be safe from hazards, gravity-related and otherwise.

He is one of 43 temporary and 16 permanent downtown sculptures put up in the past decade, including a jester, a bear, a dog, a snowman and a cube. None attract mischief like Humpty.

"He seems to be a target for various strange things," said Matt Mayberry, cultural services manager for the city of Colorado Springs, which owns the sculpture. "We would find peanut butter stuffed under his nose for strange reasons."

The sculpture was created by Minneapolis artist Kimber Fiebiger to replace a similar one that disappeared in 2003, just a few months after it was put up. The replacement cost was $6,000.

The replacement Humpty was vandalized several times, but it was the beating last fall that led officials to pull Humpty off his wall on North Tejon, near Boulder Street.

It cost $1,600 to repair the sculpture at a foundry in Loveland.

"We had to cut him in half, beat the dents from the inside out, and literally put him back together again," Mayberry said.

And they filled in his nostrils, to remove that bizarre vandalistic temptation.

Mayberry suspects the egg beaters were nighttime revelers who happened upon the egg.

He hopes the new location, off the beaten bar path, will keep him safer.

Mayberry said officials never considered keeping Humpty Dumpty safe behind walls.

Said Kosley: "You can't just let these incidents create a situation where you throw up your hands and say, ‘We can't do public art.'"

CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-1605 or scott.rappold@gazette.com