Sunday April 4, 2021 - Solo (Chris only) - International Sculpture Garedn - Rome NY - About 6 miles, some modest amount of elevation gain

This was another time killer hike. After playing video games etc in the morning I was running out of things to do so I decided to get out and go on a time consuming drive to fill my day up.  After a little googling I found the sculpture garden in Rome, a city near Utica that I'd never been to about 100 miles east of Rochester.  Since I didn't head out until 2 PM I took the Thruway (I-90) on the trip East.  Traffic moved very well but it was busy enough that it wasn't a relaxing or fun drive.  

 

Surprisingly, the sculpture garden is almost entirely on the spacious perimeter grounds of an unfinished industrial park called Griffiss Business and Technology Park.  Google's idea of where the sculpture garden is included driving some nearly abandoned or not yet fully finished roads through empty and barren parts of the industrial park.  I eventually came back out to a main road and found my way to an actual parking area for the sculpture garden.  The park has a fascinating history. It was until the 1980's Griffiss Air Force Base.  The majority of the Air Force stuff is gone but there is still a little Eastern Air Defense Sector section of the industrial park that is Air Force manned and photography is not allowed in that area.  The runways from the Air Force installation are now Griffiss International Airport.  Like the rest of the redevelopment, the airport sounds almost entirely a product of wishful thinking.  If you build it they might not come seems like the phrase that best first.  Also, very infamously, Woodstock '99 was help on these grounds also. If that isn't enough interesting stuff, it also houses about 30 different elements on the Superfund cleanup list. I knew none of that when I got there at 4 pm on Easter but it certainly added to, not detracted from my interest in it. Walking around the grounds it wasn't immediately apparent that it was a former military base but there are a lot of odd little loops of asphalt and pieces of water/drainage infrastructure that provide hints that there was something going on that isn't around any longer.  The airport in particular feels very separate from the business park which makes me wonder if a lot of the base wasn't actually in the sparsely populated around near the airport.  Maybe what is now the heart of the business park was really the less densely developed part of the air base.

The sculptures themselves are spread out.  There is one cluster of perhaps a dozen installations that are basically within a few hundred feet of each other.  What it seems some visitors don't realize is that there are another 6 or so very widely scattered sculptures along the main public road that fronts the park and also a piece or two on the other side of the road which may be owned by Rome Free Academy but seem intentionally placed to fit in with the other works. Some people said it was a small sculpture garden.  I did about 6 miles of walking and didn't even try go get to the pieces on the other side of the main road nor one set of installations a little past the main cluster. 

My friend Lyn in Oregon likes things like this so I did a lot of text messaging with him.  Some of the pieces in the collection are interesting but there were at least half a dozen that really seem like ridiculous garbage that you can't believe somebody got a grant for.  I'll start with the pictures of the ones I likes more. 

 

 

Here are some of the ones I was less impressed with along with my derisive names for some of them as titles (hover mouse over pics).

 

There was also a middle group that I found inoffensive but not worthy of remembering or commenting on:

This metal piece that looks like a snail is shown twice, once up close and the second shot that looks like an enormous lawn shows how amazingly far apart some of the pieces area.  It was a nice enough piece of work but the gigantic field it is in makes it look comically tiny.

Besides the art pieces, there was a lot of ground covered in a mix of trees and fields etc. There is at least one spot with an attractive little bridge over a creek but that led to another parking area and a water tower so it wasn't really part of any loop from where I started my walk.  

 

Overall, I enjoyed my trip to Rome.  The city itself is very junky and poor looking.  I hoped to find something interesting to eat but being Easter the pickings were slim and I had Arby's before heading home.  On the way home I mostly took back roads because I-90 was quite packed with people coming back from Easter holiday.