First stop is Seattle, the off to Kalispell Montana.

So dont be worried if I dont answer my phone. Email will also be sporadic.  See you in the fall!

You can see the church in the background  whre PK’s s now located.

To the Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council,

I would like to express my enthusiastic support for the Fourth Street Heritage Corridor as envisioned in the 2006 Ketchum Downtown Master Plan.  I have long sympathized with calls for creating a pedestrian-oriented streetscape system.  Furthermore, I whole-heartedly endorse the commitment to incorporate “[a] variety of cultural and interpretive spaces” within the entire length of Fourth Street, “showcasing the unique heritage of Ketchum.” In addition, I embrace the city’s desire to see public input into design, to use “heritage elements,” and to include “unique streetlights, benches, fountains…trees and planters, and heritage art displays” in order to “honor, share and highlight Ketchum’s various eras and its community values.” The plan is sure to foster civic pride and to help revitalize our tourism businesses.  It is just such a vision that prompted a number of civic-minded citizens to create Harriman Square in 1983.

Originally conceived in accordance with the stated objectives expressed in all of the city-wide plans available at the time (those dating from 1970 through the 1982 Ketchum-Sun Valley comprehensive plan), a number of citizens led an effort to create a “commons” area where festivals could be staged, and which would act as a hub for the celebration of our heritage.  It was decided that this area would be located at the intersection of Fourth and Leadville, and that it would be named in honor of the man who is the indisputable “father” of the greater Ketchum-Sun Valley area:  W. Averell Harriman.  These same citizens obtained an endorsement Governor Harriman and other influential residents of the Ketchum/Sun Valley area.

Just as a stated objective in the current plan is to foster broad citizen involvement in the Downtown Plan, community members working on the Harriman Square project at that time solicited input from the public.  They settled on a sun dial motif, a “nod” to the valley’s famous resort, and its reputation for unparalleled winter sunshine.  The materials chosen were deliberate:  concrete and steel—concrete for the innovative use of that material in the creation of the Sun Valley Lodge; steel to acknowledge the area’s dependence on the railways of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  The streetlamps’ shape is reminiscent of gems, as Idaho is the Gem State.  In its use of elements and in its design, Harriman Square accomplishes the very goals set forth in the current plan.

In the entire area of the proposed corridor there is not another more significant site that testifies to true grassroots civic involvement.  This was truly a community endeavor, designed and built by optimistic people who took the city’s plans to heart and decided to make them a reality.  It is the only project on the corridor to be brought to fruition in over 35 years of talking.  Despite a lack of maintenance, it is in remarkably good condition.  But it needs to be finished and refurbished.  I urge the city to recognize its responsibility and to allocate funds to this end.

A restored Harriman Square can serve as the keystone for the entire corridor. Modest in scope, it can be the impetus the city needs in order to follow the lead of those industrious citizens who, over 25 years ago, actually took those ideas for a vibrant community, and created a real monument out of concrete and steel.  It is just this kind of spirit and muscle that we celebrate when we talk of Ketchum’s heritage.  What other heritage should we be preserving?

Respectfully submitted,

Royce T. Milaskey

To give you readers a little history of Sun Valley, here are some old pictures of us building Harriman square.

It all started with a vision, but Ill get into that another time.

One of the first steps of constructing most anything on the ground is digging a hole and laying a foundation. In the back ground you can see the Sun Valley center for the arts as it was in 1982. It used to be the church that Averell Harriman visited after skiing way back in the good old days.

The hole that became Harriman Square

Today it functions as PK’s ski shop:  http://www.pkski.com/

The lamps were designed by Mark Shehan. They are forged Corten steel. The rust forms a sort of a protective layer on it and keeps it from bleeding.

The guy climbing on the lamp is Mark Sheehan. He is just messing around on the lamps. Probably  making sure they don’t fall over in heavy snow…

Mark Sheehan installing the lamps with helpers

That blue sky is why Sun Valley is called Sun Valley.

Notice the inlayed “E” as part of the compass that is an integral part of the sundial.

The glass shades represent gems from the Gem State

One of the elements that really make these lamps special is the glass shade. This is what makes these pieces a part of Idaho history.

And the finished concrete work

the finished sun dial

The bar divides the living-entertainment and dinning area. It was made from African Paduk and East Indian Rose Wood with curly maple panels and the ram has bronze horns. While standing in the curvature of the railing one looks out the glass doors and behind you on the wall is the Carving Sun-2 which I did with Joe Velosick.

Sun-2 is from a detail from a poster that was circulated by the in the late 1700′s by DuPont to sell gun powder out of Delaware.

To give you some perspective of the significance of this carving, here is a brief history of it: DuPont was founded in 1802 by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, using capital raised in France and gunpowder machinery imported from France. The company was started at theEleutherian Mills, on the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, USA two years after he and his family left France to escape the French Revolution. It began as a manufacturer of gunpowder, as du Pont had noticed that the industry in North America was lagging behind Europe and saw a market for it. The company grew quickly, and by the mid 19th century had become the largest supplier of gunpowder to the United States military, supplying as much as half of the powder used by the Union Army during the American Civil War. (The Eleutherian Mills site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and is now a museum covering this history that may be visited today.)

The whole house was ‘gentry’ class leisure and with family and or out door types of scenes built into the mill work.

The After Hunting is a gun and amo cabinet made from birds eye, curly maple and East Indian Rose Wood. The detail shows some silver ducks and a reed scene. Each duck was different and made by Barry Peterson a jewler still here.

The telephone nook was in the kitchen and behind the wall with the Sun-2 carving. Same types of woods.

A sundial is a device that measures time by the position of the Sun. In common designs such as the horizontal sundial, the sun casts a shadow from its style (a thin rod or a sharp, straight edge) onto a flat surface marked with lines indicating the hours of the day. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow-edge progressively aligns with different hour-lines on the plate. Such designs rely on the style being aligned with the axis of the Earth’s rotation. Hence, if such a sundial is to tell the correct time, the style must point towards true North (not the north or south magnetic pole) and the style’s angle with horizontal must equal the sundial’s geographical latitude.

There are many kinds of sundials, but I will focus on the analemmatic sundial which is the kind  on Harriman Square.

An analemmatic sundial uses a vertical gnomon and its hour lines are the vertical projection of the hour lines of a circular equatorial sundial onto a flat plane. Therefore, the analemmatic sundial is an ellipse, where the short axis is aligned North-South and the long axis is aligned East-West. The noon hour line points true North, whereas the hour lines for 6am and 6pm point due West and East, respectively.

Here are a few examples:

William Averell Harriman (November 15, 1891  – July 26, 1986) was an  politician, businessman, and diplomat. He was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman. He served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman and later as Governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by President Truman but lost to Adlai Stevenson. Harriman served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Europe and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. Ambassador to Britain. He served in various positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Among his wives were Marie Norton Whitney, who left her husband Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney to marry him, and Pamela Harriman, former wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph

During the summer of 1899, Harriman’s father organized the Harriman Alaska Expedition, a philanthropic-scientific survey of coastal Alaska and Russia that attracted twenty-five of the leading scientific, naturalist and artist luminaries of the day, including John Muir, John Burroughs, George Bird Grinnell, C. Hart Merriam, Grove Karl Gilbert, and Edward Curtis, along with 100 family members and staff, aboard the steamship George Elder. Young Harriman would have his first introduction to the nation – Russia – that he would spend a significant amount of attention on in his later life in public service.

Using money from his father, in 1922 he established W.A. Harriman & Co, a banking business. In 1927, his brother Roland joined the business and the name was changed to Harriman Brothers & Company. In 1931, they merged with Brown Bros. & Co. to create the highly successful Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

Harriman Square in the Future

One of my hopes is that the intersection will one day be finished to reflect the accomplishments of this great man. Notice the sculpture of A. Harriman on the center left.

Susan Bailey on Royce Milaskey

The earlier design didnt incorporate the sundail as you can see in the watercolor rendering below.

Harriman Square in the spring time.

One day I had an epiphany of using a sundial emblem inlayed into the concrete as a design element.

Silver (crucifixion nails and crown of thorns): cca. 1lb (0.45kgs)

Glass(glass top): cca. 40 lbs (18kgs)

Bronze (Jesus face, Star of David and Janus base): cca: 100lbs (45kgs)

Tallest point: Ebony Janus at 5ft (1.5m)

Widest: Glass top above crucifixion at 4’6”(1.37m)

Longest: Glass top above head and feet of Jesus at 6ft (1.8m)