Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Colored balls are flying, and people are scrambling on catwalks. City Museum’s the usual blur of hot kinetic energy. But just off the parking lot is a chunk of serene white marble that’s been cold for a thousand years. Paul Bayer started carving it not long after his boss and stone-carving buddy, City Museum founder Bob Cassilly, was found dead in September 2011.
Bayer knew this piece of marble. It had come from the Colorado Yule quarry that yielded the columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Twenty years ago, he’d almost had a chance to carve it, after a St. Louis slab-and-tile company eased it down in the middle of its showroom and poured concrete around it. When the place changed hands, new owners told him, “If you can get it out, it’s yours.”
“That’s a double-dare,” Bayer tells me. “We jackhammered it up and got a 30-ton forklift.”
First Bayer carved Isis, protector of children. Cassilly had carved Isis many times within the museum, and for one last time Bayer followed his lead: “I wanted people to feel that Bob was still here.”
Then Bayer started carving the phoenix of ancient mythology. It rose from its ashes—just as the museum was now rising from the ashes left by Cassilly.
That’s when Bayer ran into a little resistance. The new ownership said it didn’t look like a phoenix and insisted so hard that Bayer said, “Fine. It’s a razor-backed desert sand lander.” He was given a list of more urgent museum priorities. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll work on this on my own time.”
That bought him total freedom, and now he carves in the parking lot on Saturdays and sells the marble he chips away as stamped, signed souvenirs to help pay for his tools. He’s explaining all this when the museum’s executive director, Rick Erwin, walks by. I ask Erwin what he thinks of the piece. He grins. “It gives me a lot of trouble because it has boobs out in front. I have to tell ’em it’s art.”
People really object? “Oh, hell yeah. There was one guy who notified the public administrator.”
What about the…er…tension with the ownership? “We are not the easiest people,” Erwin says diplomatically. “If it’s on museum time, we’re going to dictate—and we were dictating. We were hindering Paul’s vision.”
I ask Erwin what he might have dictated. “Oh, I’m a quiet man,” he says, “but feathers were a big deal with the ownership. He called them wispy.” Bayer pulls over a ladder for me, and I climb up to see the top of the phoenix’s head, wrapped in sinuous tendrils. “He wanted strong feathers.”
Erwin heads inside, and Bayer lets me wield the air hammer. “Hold it like a pencil,” he says, “and steady the chisel with your other hand. You can angle it to make the fine lines on the feathers.” I hesitate. “You’re not going to screw it up,” he promises. “I’ve got 20 tons of rock to work with!
“The hardest part,” he continues, “is dropping into the floor. I’m going 40 inches down. And I’ll make holes in the side so you can crawl in. When a little kid’s standing inside, you won’t even be able to see him. And then when the parents climb in after them, they’ll find all kinds of carvings—a child’s face coming out of the wall, or a child’s hand reaching out.”
The phoenix’s talons will grasp a book—Bayer shows me the scale model. “The book is creativity and imagination,” he says, “and he’s protecting it from those who don’t understand either of those things.”
A Texan tourist in an orange Harley hoodie pronounces the sculpture “cool.” Literally, Bayer says: “The white marble reflects the sunlight.” He describes how he moves from big grinders to a 13-part hand-sanding process. Cassilly Crew member Kurt Knickmeyer catches that last comment. “Paul’s a nut about stone,” he tells me. “I’ve never seen anybody as passionate about a medium.”
Bayer says he likes it because it’s raw and pure—“the only medium that’s pulled out of the ground unchanged by man.”
“And it fights back,” Knickmeyer says. “Paul’s a master at manipulating it. He disappears over the top and he’s down there and water’s flying and stone’s flying, and all of a sudden he drives a forklift over and lifts out a big piece of stone. It’s real amusing.”
Bayer’s eyebrows go up. “Never saw it as amusing.” He turns to me. “Kurt’s the architect of the castle.”
“More people stop at the stone,” Knickmeyer says. “The castle doesn’t have boobs.”
While Bayer runs into the stone shop—he wants to show me the 18-inch diamond-bladed chainsaw he plunges into the stone—a little girl comes up, tickled by the sea turtle carved on top.
“Someday you’ll be able to crawl inside the marble,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “Is he in there now?”
I hide a smile, my hand caressing the still-solid wall. “No, he didn’t make the hole yet. But here’s a model of what it will look like.”
She peers at the big book the phoenix is guarding with his outspread wings. “Will I be able to crawl in there?” she asks excitedly, pointing to the cranny between the bird’s breast and the open book’s pages. My mouth opens to say, “Oh, no, that might be dangerous and it’s too tight a space and—”
And then I remember that it is informed by Bob Cassilly’s spirit. I shrug. “Who knows? They might find a way.”
