Robert Gann was on his regular morning run route along Brush Creek Sunday morning when the glint of raw metal on the William Volker Memorial Fountain caught his eye. Gann said he didn’t want to assume the worst, but the damage looked troubling.
“At first, it's like one of those things when you see it, something, you know, doesn't seem right,” Gann said. “It was such a clean cut.”
Gann, who owns Habitat Contemporary Gallery, said he didn’t know at first if it was vandalism or a planned repair. He said the fountain is one of his favorites in the city.
Gann took a photograph of the damage and posted it on Facebook and Instagram, then made a report to 311.
Mark McHenry is president of The City of Fountains Foundation and the former director of the Kansas City, Missouri Parks and Recreation Department. McHenry said it was clearly vandalism — he’s seen this kind of thing before.
“You just get mad when things like this happen,” he said. “It just irritates you because it's vandalism and theft both.”
The fountain has been a feature of the Kansas City landscape for more than six decades. Swedish artist Carl Milles created the sculptural grouping of five figures with a 28-foot figure of St. Martin of Tours representing the Good Samaritan on horseback. The equestrian figure was cast in Florence, Italy, and was one of Milles’ final works. The sculptor died in 1955.
“Milles is world-renowned, and we were lucky to have his work here,” McHenry said. “I would hope it could be repaired now, but it might be easier said than done.”
The city commissioned the fountain in 1950 for $125,000 and originally installed it at Theis Mall on September 20, 1958. It was created in tribute to Kansas City businessman and home-furnishings entrepreneur William Volker, who died in 1947 and was known for his philanthropy.
The Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department owns and maintains the fountain, along with 48 other fountains within the city. The City of Fountains Foundation, created in 1973, raises funds and holds endowments for more than 25 fountains, sculptures and monuments in the city and partners with the Parks and Recreation Department to assist with major repairs and ongoing maintenance.
The fountain has stood at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard between Oak and Cherry Streets, since the Park Department moved the Volker Memorial in 1993 to make way for development along Brush Creek.
McHenry said the vandalism called to mind a 2021 theft. Three people allegedly stole local sculptor Kwan Wu's seven-foot-tall, 400-pound statue of an Indigenous woman trading with François Chouteau.
McHenry said the statue was recovered and the three were taken into custody, but the statue was in pieces. McHenry said it was a lucky break.
"Fortunately, the police department caught them before it was melted down and we got all the pieces," he said. “We went to a gentleman that handles that kind of work and he put the whole thing back together. It's back up there today and you wouldn't know it now.”
McHenry said the repair to the Chouteau figure cost less than $15,000. The process of restoring the two Milles sculptures will be more complex if the bronze arm and leg aren’t located.
“If you don't have the piece, it's a little more challenging,” McHenry said.“You have to go back to the foundry, and Milles' studio is in Stockholm, Sweden,” McHenry said. “Maybe they could recreate a new piece, but that's all speculative.”
The current scrap metal price of bronze has held steady at around $2.70 per pound. Restoring the work will cost thousands of dollars.
“It’s a whole lot of nothing for what they got from a whole lot of whatever it's going to take for us to put this back together,” McHenry said. “It creates a lot of time and energy and inconvenience and money to repair it.”
Statue thefts tend to be rare, but in recent years, electric saws have made the crime easier.
In February, the high-profile theft of a bronze Jackie Robinson statue shocked the nation. The statue, captured on surveillance video, was cut off at the ankles at McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas. Days later the statue was discovered smoldering in a trash can. Wichita police later arrested a 45-year-old man in connection with the theft.
The metro has a longstanding problem with metal theft. The Kansas City Council passedtougher scrap yard laws in 2018 after neighborhood leaders in the Northeast raised concerns about houses being gutted to harvest the copper in wiring.
For Robb Gann, the damage to his favorite fountain is disturbing on another level.
“There's shock and disbelief that anybody would vandalize it. Gann said. “If somebody really needed that metal just to make money, it speaks to the disparity of the wealth and poverty in the country that somebody went to great lengths to get these pieces just to melt it down.”
