Word arrived recently that a Pacific Rim Park installation in Vladivostok had been demolished. An Open Letter from James Hubbell and Kyle Bergman
”Soil and Soul Park” was he first Pacific Rim Park was built in Vladivostok in 1994. It was built on the site of the Far Eastern State University, the largest university in Eastern Russia. The University gave PRP a great site at the top of the city’s beautiful funicular station, overlooking the entire port of Vladivostok.
Several years ago, the University moved locations, and the entire university site was poised to be developed. The site is now under construction for a new cultural center for Vladivostok. Last week the park was removed to make way for the land’s new use.
We are sad that the park is no longer standing, but also grateful for all of the doors that making the park opened. It was a great adventure to build that park. The stories and lore are epic, and the process of creating it formed the very DNA of the Pacific Rim Park project.
One of the many amazing things that happened during its building was when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-renowned Nobel Prize winning Russian author and political dissident, returned to Russia after 20 years in exile, Vladivostok was his entry point. During his short stay he came to our construction site to talk with us because he liked seeing Russian and American students working together. It was an early sign that the park touched people’s imagination.
It’s hard to talk about the park and not remember Gennady Turmov, who passed away last year. The Pacific Rim Park would not have happened as we know it without Gennady, who was the President of the University. Although the park is no longer standing, the friendships built there remain strong today. Pacific Rim Park is a family and has a family tree. The original site of the park in Vladivostok is connected to the parks that followed. Let’s pull together and continue the legacy by building a new park in Vladivostok and in more cities around the Pacific. The park’s removal is not an ending but an opening, an opportunity for more adventures as we grow the PRP family.
—James Hubbell & Kyle Bergman
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When Battlements Open
Across the sweep of a great land
from Pacific cliff to ancient Celtic coves
stretch lands and forests
On hills and bays in the farthest corner
to the east. To the southa fortress grew,
defenders of Czars and commissars.
Why, here, did we cometo build within the walls
and battlements above the Pacific fleet,
above this Vladivostok,a city boxed and silent
for half a century?
Why did we come?
We, too, built walls not to close, but to open.
Not to name, but to celebrate.
An amphitheater built by the
hands of the young,at times in the mud
their ancestors knew so well.
Built ‘til the bodies ached, built from bricks that had
walled the old, city from stone that had known the sea,
built to celebrate, to listen …
we placed a white pearl to remember the beginning.
May this effort be an opening,a birth, a magic place,
a place where angels enter in, where hope is born.
Enter this sacred land.
Bring again the song of the Firebird
that trees may whisper the love to all the people,
where leaves long fallen on a forgotten earth
will move again.
Bring back hope to a tortured land.
Awaken again, the beauty
that is the soul of Russia.
James T. Hubbell, 1994
