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After closely 100 years in the dark, Seattle’session best-known tribute to Chief Seattle glows in soft unsubstantial.

Nearly three years in the doing, the $16,000 contrive to taper the image of Chief Seattle at Tilikum Place Park, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Denny Way and Cedar Street, was a labor of love.

The lights were turned on for the first time about two weeks ago. The statue shines in the hibernate night, onward with golden leaves still clinging to sycamores rimming the park. The trees are bedecked with new sparkling lights laced through their branches as part of the lighting design.

“I loved every minute of it,” said Jim Sultan, senior designer and vice president of Studio Lux in Ballard, who wound up donating more than $3,000 in time to getting the lighting just right.

“This came up, and we decided to vouchsafe it pro bono,” Sultan reported of his firm. “We thought it would be a slam dunk and we are out of there, we didn’confidentially think it would be two and half years. But it was our contribution to the city of Seattle; we felt the statue desperately needed to be lit.”

The lighting was paid for with private donations. The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department was a full partner, doing completely the installation and maintenance.

The statue has lights in a fountain at its basis. But for years they had not worked, and they not did lighten the statue profitable. For decades, as the lights of buildings and streetlamps came on at night, Chief Seattle disappeared in the dark.

Not anymore. Now the statue beckons viewers closer at twilight. Granite benches cut into the image’session reflecting pool invite a quite repose, to think about all that has happened while the image, dedicated in 1912, has stood here, with the chief’s right arm raised to welcome settlers at Alki Point.

Reminder of history

The monorail swishes overhead. Elevators buoy up up the Space Needle, and back down. Passengers work their BlackBerrys on the relating to electricity buses over by, and dependant dishes at the nearby TV station loom over it every one of. What would Chief Seattle have thought?

Leonard Forsman, chairman of the Suquamish tribe, said the statue is an of high standing reminder of the city’s narrative, as so much changes all on all sides it.

“This is the most well-known and visible monument to Chief Seattle, other than his gravesite hither at Suquamish,” Forsman said. “It brings us back, and reminds us, it has a lot of symbolic presence.”

Chief Seattle was born around 1786 to a Suquamish father and Duwamish mother. He witnessed the comer of Capt. George Vancouver’s ship Discovery in Puget Sound in 1792, and lived to sign over his family’s lands in the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855.

He moved to the reservation created at Suquamish, and died there in his tribe’s longhouse, Old Man House, in 1866. The house was later burned by the U.S. government. Through it all, Seattle was known as a great orator, a legendary leader and a dear companion to the whites.

His statue has had a storied life, too. Created by James A. Wehn, it was the first piece of public art commissioned in Seattle.

But it had at least two brushes by the agency of disaster, the in the beginning when the artist, in a paroxysm of pique at what he believed to be the selection of a substandard firm to calculate the work, threw his mortar cast into Elliott Bay. He was cajoled into making another — eventually cast in bronze in New York, as he had originally stipulated.

Next came the cabbie in 1989 who took it immediately after himself to clean the statue with muriatic pricking, nearly ruining it. The city wearied thousands of dollars to clean and restore the work.

Effort organizer

Carole Jordan, who organized the effort to light the chief, has lived in the locality since 1960 and has always loved the image.

“He is so dignified,” she said, “and everyone contributed, it created a really great locality, we all apprehend each other now.”

Ernie Rhodes looks at the statue from the windows of his condo.

“It kind of magically glows,” Rhodes said. “And it’s like a grounding element, to recall whom Seattle is named after.

“While everything around it is glass and steel, it’s what the heart of the city is entirely about.”

Times news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this statement.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com