Jessica was biking down Virginia Avenue in late January, when she turned to look at “Scottie”. She was in the habit of checking on the bronze statue of a four-foot high terrier, sculpted by her friend Will Fleishell every time she ed by the Virginia Avenue Park (901 Virginia Ave. SE).
But Scottie was gone.
It would have been no small feat. The 3-foot high bronze sculpture, which had been placed just outside the gates of the Virginia Avenue Dog Park nearly two years earlier, weighed about 500 lbs.
All that was left was the outline of the base was left on the marble plinth.
She immediately called Fleishell.
Fleishell is a District native and noted artist. You probably have one of his works in your home right now: he created the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the five-dollar bill when worked for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. A noted painter, sculptor and now an instructor at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW), Fleishell says every artwork is a bit like a child to the artist.
And now Scottie is missing.
“I got to tell you, I’m so I’ve been so disappointed and upset and depressed about it, and there’s really nothing I can do,” Fleishell said.
“Just give it back. That’s all I care about,” he pleas.
Memorial
The Scottie is a sort of memorial for Bernadette Bloom, who taught at River Park Nursery School (RPNS) for more than thirty years. She was still teaching when she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 2016, just after weeks after completing her final academic year.
Families ed her as a parenting coach and child psychologist as much as a teacher, with many recalling her advice decades after their children finished the two-year program. Marcia Leonard, whose daughter attended River Park in the late 90s, told the Hill Rag in 2016,“Her teaching, her style, her incredible devotion to children, shaped both my parenting and our choice of schools and even our daily expressions.”
One of Bloom’s signature field trips was to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Memorial along the Tidal Basin, said Jody Pratt, whose son was in Bloom’s final class.
Bloom would bring her classroom full of two- and three-year-olds to see the statue of the president in his wheelchair. “She would talk about how people move their bodies all different ways and some people use wheelchairs,” said Pratt.
Bloom would also use the opportunity to discuss the size of bodies. Before the trip, each child would measure out their size on a strip of paper, then bring their “measuring tapes” with them. The class then compared their tapes to the statue of FDR’s little Scottish terrier, Fala. “He was built on a toddler scale,” Pratt said of Fala, “so he was very approachable to preschoolers.”
When Bloom ed, several RPNS families thought that there was no better way to honor the educator than with the Hill’s own Fala statue. It would be placed on the Hill, they envisioned, eye level with preschoolers who would scramble all over it —just as Bloom would have wanted.
Together, they established a fundraiser, raising more than $30,000 to pay for the statue, the plinth and the “foot” to install it.
But despite the group offering the work as a gift to the city, by the time the statue was complete in 2018, they still had no place to put it.
Eventually, in 2020 Pratt signed papers transferring ownership of the work to the District via the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR). DPR found a site for the statue, just outside the Virginia Dog Park, setting installation for May 2023. Pratt was disappointed, believing the location would lead people to believe the statue was dedicated to a dog, rather than a person. But after 7 years, she was glad the work would finally see the light.
“Anything Not Nailed Down”
Three years later, in May 2023, Fleishell went to watch the long-awaited installation of the work. But he immediately had concerns. The statue was epoxied —glued, rather than bolted— into place. A few days after installation, he went by to look at the statue. It had slid so far off center that it had almost come off the plinth, he said. The installers came back to correct it, but Fleishell was certain it should be bolted down.
“I was able by myself to shift the dog back into place,” he texted Pratt then, standing next to the shifted statue. “If I can do that with my bad back, then one or two young guys could easily lift that thing up and carry it off.“
Two years later, it appears someone did just that.
“They’ll take anything that isn’t nailed down,” Pratt said, “and it wasn’t.”
Gabrielle Doyle first noted the statue in spring 2023 as she worked in her community garden allotment at Virginia Avenue Park. She was familiar with Fleishell from drawing lessons at CHAW and enjoyed the whimsy of the piece.
When she realized it was missing earlier this year, she began ing media, hoping to bring attention to the theft. “I just think a piece of joy is gone,” she said.
Bring Scottie Back
Pratt says she hopes that someone will return the statue, but she fears the piece, cast in museum-quality bronze silicate, was taken for scrap. “The bronze alone is worth thousands of dollars,” she said.
“It’s just, I can’t even tell you, it’s devastating,” Pratt said. It’s devastating to the artist who worked on it and played custodian to the work for years, she said, to the families who worked to raise funds to make it a reality and finally to the community that has lost a public work of art and joy.
Both Pratt and Doyle say their best case scenario is that the city or another entity would fund another public art piece to replace it.
But Fleishell just wants it back, no questions asked. His plea: just bring Scottie back and leave him in the park, no questions asked.
“You know, it’s, it’s an intrinsic value that it’s hard to kind of put a value on,” he said. Then he tries. “It makes a child smile,” the artist says, wistfully, tying the art to Bloom, the teacher who brought joy to so many children.
“That’s what the value is.”
