A local lighting designer is on a mission to bring a Walker Hancock work out of the shadows.

The angle at which the light falls upon sculpture is everything. Out of doors it is from above and around — as it should be — for most of the day. But indoors some human being is responsible for providing a source of light that will correctly reveal the forms… The sculptor suffers to see how often this responsibility is ignored.

When Walker Hancock wrote the lines above, he had in mind the statue of Abraham Lincoln that he had produced for the National Cathedral in Washington, but he could also have been referring to his Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial. The Memorial— the bronze sculpture of an angel lifting a solider that sits at the east end of 30th Street Station and soars 39 feet from its base to the tips of its wings — languishes in a gloom so intense that despite its towering height, many rail travelers never even notice its existence. If you want to appreciate the problem, enter the station from the 29th Street side, get very close to the sculpture, stare straight up and squint hard. You might be able to decipher this inscription: "That all travelers here may remember those of the Pennsylvania Railroad who did not return from the Second World War."

When Philadelphia lighting designer Mark O’Maley was growing up, he lived two towns away from Walker Hancock’s Massachusetts studio, and spent summers on a property that his family owned on Hancock’s street. "Every summer meant swimming in Walker’s quarry and seeing what was in his studio. I remember being overwhelmed when I walked into the studio — the scale models, sketches, plaster moldings, carvings. And just seeing his tools, the chisels and knives, knowing that’s where all the work came from…" O’Maley sometimes posed for Hancock’s work, as did other people in the neighborhood: one man posed for the Memorial’s angel, and that man’s brother posed for the hands of the Memorial’s soldier. "I can look back," O’Maley says, "and see that knowing Walker helped form my appreciation of the arts, showed me that art was something viable to do with my life."

O’Maley has gone on to become an accomplished theatrical lighting designer with a lengthy list of professional credits, including work for the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and a position as resident designer and production manager for Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater.

In the fall of 1997, about a year before Hancock died at the age of 97, O’Maley was preparing to visit Philadelphia for the first time. Hancock had a request for him: "Go to 30th Street," O’Maley remembers him saying, "and see what they’ve done to my sculpture."

That’s what O’Maley did. "Seeing the Memorial was my first stop in Philly. I drove to my friend’s house and said ‘You need to take me to the train station.’ I was so awed by finally seeing the piece, looking at those wings spreading out. The piece was Walker’s pride and joy, his favorite."

In July of ’98, O’Maley rented an apartment in Northern Liberties and started making his home in Philadelphia. But because he frequently traveled out of town by train, he had many more opportunities to view the Memorial. "I was traveling through 30th Street two or three times a week," he says. "The more I looked at the War Memorial, the more I thought ‘This is horribly lit, this is disgraceful.’" In November of last year, he finally decided that the solution to the piece’s lighting problem was to relight it himself. He was convinced that the project would be neither difficult nor expensive — in fact, he was willing to work free of charge. All he needed was permission.

Walker Hancock was born in 1901, started making sculpture early on, and remained involved in that work until extreme old age. He made statues and busts of patriots, poets and presidents — from John Paul Jones to Robert Frost to George Bush (the elder). He was personally acquainted with Frost and Bush; according to an Amtrak employee, Bush once insisted that his train make an unscheduled stop in Philly so that he could view the Memorial.

For 38 years — from 1929 until 1967 — Hancock taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Several of his works, in addition to the War Memorial, reside in Philadelphia: both his statue of John Paul Jones and a sculpture called Air sit in Fairmount Park.

When O’Maley embarked on his effort to relight the Memorial, he started at Amtrak’s customer service office at 30th Street. He didn’t get much encouragement there, so he proceeded to U.S. Equities, the firm that handles much of the station’s operations for Amtrak, then he started writing letters to Amtrak’s national office. A couple of months dragged by and O’Maley was unable to reach anyone at Amtrak who could give the job the go-ahead.

In February, however, things took a surprising turn: O’Maley learned that a project to relight the sculpture had already been undertaken. That project had been carried out at the request of Happy Fernandez, former City Councilwoman and now president of Moore College of Art and Design, and had been completed in November 1997 — around the time of O’Maley’s first visit to Philly.

The effects of the project are difficult to see. "The current lighting," O’Maley says, "is practically non-existent. The War Memorial is just a large mass right now. Only when you get right up to it do you see the texture, the subtlety of the faces, or even that the angel is pulling the soldier out of flames."

Fernandez confirmed her involvement in the ’97 project — which, she said, had an unveiling complete with a grand choir and trumpeter. She also stated that her brother-in-law, Leon Fernandez of Charlestown, MA, knew Hancock and had consulted with the sculptor on the relighting. But O’Maley, based partly on his conversations with Hancock’s former apprentice, believes that Hancock probably knew about but was not very involved in the project. To begin with, he was extremely old at the time. Moreover, Hancock was a man who once mailed a check to the National Cathedral to pay for one hundred years’ worth of light bulbs for his Lincoln statue — so it’s difficult to imagine him approving of the current lighting arrangement.

Fernandez acknowledges that the current lighting is not ideal; she had just passed through the station a few weeks previously and noticed it herself. As a result Fernandez expressed enthusiasm for O’Maley’s project, and even offered to chip in money toward materials. More important, she provided O’Maley an entry into 30th Street’s management, placing a phone call to Bill Epstein, Director of Government Affairs for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Soon after that, O’Maley was talking with both Epstein and Susan DiPilla, General Manager of U.S. Equities’ Philadelphia operation, discussing the possibility of completing his relighting project in time for the 100th anniversary of Hancock’s birth, on June 28.

At present though, the proposed relighting seems slightly less than a 100 percent certainty: in separate interviews, DiPilla and Epstein expressed slightly different levels of commitment. DiPilla was highly enthusiastic, saying "We can take this [idea] and run with it… as long as the funds exist." She spoke of planning a series of events for the month of June, culminating in an unveiling on June 28. Epstein was a bit more restrained. "We would be very happy to accept any aid that [O’Maley] wants to offer," he said. "Something needs to be done, I can’t tell you what…We think we’re going to end up with a nice little project here… It would be a wonderful gesture if we could unveil it on June 28."

Last week O’Maley presented the officials at 30th Street with a "letter of agreement," which is meant to protect the artistic integrity of the lighting design that he will eventually submit. He intends to travel to Washington to examine the Archives of American Art, which are supposed to contain letters in which Hancock expressed his wishes for the piece; and he wants to explore the idea of restoring a glare-reducing fiberglass curtain that once covered a window at the station’s east end.

According to DiPilla, the sculpture is frequently referred to by 30th Street regulars as St. Michael. "People call our office all the time and say ‘Could you look to see if there’s somebody waiting by St. Michael?’ I guess it’s the archangel." But if you sit on a bench at 30th Street and watch people mill around the station, you’ll see that very few travelers stop to look at the piece; few, in fact, even appear to notice it. During a recent, 15-minute stretch of time, only a tour group of schoolchildren lingered near the work. Otherwise, not a single traveler appeared to give a thought to those who did not return from the war.

"I look at the project from two standpoints," O’Maley says. "First, the War Memorial is a sculpture I knew [from scale models and photos] when I was growing up, and as a lighting designer I’d like to fulfill Walker’s wishes. But second, the piece commemorates 1,300 people who died, and it shouldn’t be relegated to the shadows. It’s my take that if it’s properly lit, people won’t continue to lean on it or stack their luggage against it. I want to make the sculpture come back to life, to give it vitality and glow and warmth…. I want to see the Memorial become the predominant point in a magnificent room."

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