Seeing what was going on and knowing that such a restoration would only destroy the original character of the mission, Gutzon wrote an article in protest against what seemed to him vandalism, but never published it because he did not want to hurt the feelings of a friend who was most active in the undertaking. Instead, he sent her the typed article with this friendly warning: “I alone am honest enough to tell you that you cannot restore the lost lines of a great poem, the lost notes of a great opera, the lost parts of a great building, the lost parts of a great painting.”
And there were other projects. There were two large musical societies in the city, both run by women, with considerable rivalry between them. The leader of one club came to the sculptor begging his help in building an open-air theater in an old quarry in Breckenridge Park where she could have performances by her Civic Opera Company. “We have no money to pay an architect,” she said. “Won’t you design us a theater, just for the love of art and music?”
The project interested the sculptor and he went out to the quarry to study its possibilities. Mrs. Borglum vividly remembers one moonlight night when she and Gutzon were accompanied by Mrs. Drought and her guest, a professor from Dublin, Ireland, a man well acquainted with the new Irish Theater in Dublin, who had come to Texas on a lecture tour. He bubbled over with enthusiasm when Gutzon pointed out a little knoll overlooking the quarry which he had already selected as a stage. On each side of this he planned a group of columns with dressing rooms behind. For the curtain he designed something new—a barrage of water jets which could be turned on or off at will. When the curtain was down, colored lights would play on the water, creating an eerie effect and concealing the stage from the audience. All details were so carefully worked out that the only expense to the city would be for material and labor, with no fee for the designer, Gutzon, who would act also as superintendent of the work. To make sure that his architectural plans were correct, he summoned at his own expense Mr. Kimball, who had been president of the National Institute of Architects. This helpful friend not only made blueprints and drew up specifications but made a pretty water-color sketch to show how the theater would look when finished.
Naturally the members of the Civic Opera and the San Antonio Woman’s Club were delighted. In a mass they went to the City Hall when the plan was submitted to the council. Without a dissenting vote a resolution was passed accepting the open-air theater as the sculptor had planned it.
And that, one grieves to record, was the end of another Gutzon Borglum dream. After a long delay a conventional design by a local architect was “unanimously approved” by the same city fathers. The theater was built at city expense. And the lady who had begged the sculptor to design the theater because she had no money to pay an architect told him that the wife of one of her leading singers was the local architect’s sister. The lady accepted the tenor’s brother-in-law because it made her tenor happy. “And, dear Mr. Borglum, what else could I do?” wailed the lady.
Gutzon was much taken with the appearance of Corpus Christi, Texas; however, he felt the shore line was unsightly. So he hired an aviator to take pictures of the town showing the residential portion on a plateau high above the gulf and the crowded business district along the shore line. He took the mayor and some other citizens on a motor trip to Galveston and along the Gulf Coast to Florida to see how other cities had dealt with similar water-front problems.
He built a plaster model of Corpus Christi with a fine new—and artistic—concrete promenade along the sea front, with steps down to the water’s edge, and exhibited it in the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce. He designed approaches for a new bridge to replace the old drawbridge that frequently tied up traffic for half an hour at a time. And he got a Mr. Harrington of Kansas City, a reputable bridge builder, to design a bridge. The cost of this improvement, he felt, would speedily be paid by toll collected from the passing cars.
Everybody was interested in Borglum’s great enterprise. A loan project was placed before the R.F.C., which turned it over to the W.P.A., which started everything all over again. In the end the whole business got into the hands of the state W.P.A. at Fort Worth, and the water-front-bridge development was changed to a sewer project. Probably the sewer was needed and anyhow it had not been proposed by a stranger.
Texas, the sculptor learned, was a place where big things were done bigly; but, nevertheless, in the accustomed fashion.