High on a hill above this city of tawny adobe houses, the old town dump looks out over the Jemez, Ortiz, Sandia and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges.
It’s a stunning setting that prompts people to stop their cars and admire the view when they bring their recyclables there.
Now a new attraction beckons, an extraordinary blend of European tradition and American humor evoking ancient civilizations and today’s culture of consumer profligacy.
It’s Stonefridge, a replica of England’s famed Stonehenge made of discarded refrigerators.
Documentary filmmaker Adam Horowitz has labored almost six years to erect this tour de force at the site some Santa Fe residents claim is the prettiest former trash heap in the United States.
He’s barely half done.
“I see this as a satirical comment on how wasteful our civilization is,” says Horowitz, who studied archeology in college and visited Stonehenge when he was 12.
Horowitz didn’t realize it when he started, but he’s got company. Americans love to appropriate things from other places, everything from names (Athens, Ga.) to styles (witness the soaring Gothic Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York).
As it turns out, Stonehenge–a marvel of engineering created in stages between 3100 and 2000 B.C. that may have served as a primitive astronomical observatory–is the most replicated ancient monument in the U.S., according to the authors of the tourism guide and Web site Roadside America.
Foamhenge, scaled to the original’s size and shape, is the newest copy in Natural Bridge, Va., near a popular tourist destination in the Blue Ridge Mountains. That replica was finished Monday by a fiberglass sculpture artist.
“The real one is so far, most people can’t make it there,” says Mark Cline, 43, who calls himself the “P.T. Barnum of the Blue Ridge.” Admittedly, Foamhenge isn’t as hard as the original stone monument–it’s a touch springy, actually–but “I think it can be a very important learning tool,” Cline contends.
Then there’s Carhenge near Alliance, Neb., made of used cars standing with their trunks in the ground or perched precariously on top of one another. Think of an auto junk heap elevated upright, arranged symmetrically and spray-painted gray.
Carhenge was conceived as a memorial to artist Jim Reinder’s father, who once lived in the area. About 35 relatives gathered in 1987 to build it, dedicating their creation on the summer solstice with champagne, poetry and songs, according to a history of the monument on the Carhenge Web site.
“There must be something primitive in our souls that attracts us to these circular, monumental forms,” says Ken Smith, co-author of “Roadside America.”
The first Stonehenge look-alike in the U.S. remains one of the most impressive. Entrepreneur Sam Hill erected his monument, made of blocks of poured concrete, on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River in Goldendale, Wash., as tribute to soldiers who had lost their lives in World War I. Begun in 1918, Sam Hill’s Stonehenge, as it is known, was completed in 1929 not long before its architect’s death.
Texas, Georgia, Missouri and New Hampshire also have Stonehenge replicas. A private golf course in Montana recently commissioned yet another copy, Smith reports.
None, however, makes a political statement quite like Stonefridge, which greets visitors with a sign saying “From the Stone Age to the appliance age.”
Inspiration came to Horowitz one day in 1996 when he drove up the hill to the former Santa Fe landfill and saw a field of used washers, dryers, dishwashers and refrigerators.
“It occurred to me all this technological accomplishment gone to waste was a metaphor for our civilization,” he says. “The appliances looked like building blocks, and I realized I could make a monument that would inspire us to think about consumerism and how we degrade the environment.”
Horowitz’s proposal wasn’t an easy sell with officials of Santa Fe, a hub of Southwestern culture and an art mecca for collectors around the world.
Some bureaucrats argued that “trash is trash, and art is art, and art made from trash doesn’t compute,” remembers Steven Mills, a longtime resident, writer and friend of Horowitz’s. Others were concerned about high winds that could come off the mountains and blow the structure over.
Still, Horowitz, now 46, persevered, hiring a lawyer to negotiate with the city and engineers to ensure that Stonefridge could withstand 100-m.p.h. winds. After hundreds of refrigerators he had collected several years ago at the site were “accidentally” bulldozed by the city waste department, he started collecting again and now has close to the 200 he estimates will be needed to complete the monument.
“Most normal human beings would have given up years ago,” Mills says.
Each “stone” in the outer circle is made of two refrigerators stacked on top of each other, bolted and weighted down with adobe brick inside. Each of the towering structures in an inner circle rises three refrigerators high. The colors are those known in kitchens across America: avocado, mustard, black, white. The monument is aligned to the west, where it faces Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb, which Horowitz calls “the atomic solstice.” (The original is aligned to the northeast and the rising of the sun on the summer solstice.)
“It’s clever,” says Karen Heldmeyer, a Santa Fe City Council member, and “the message that one way or another garbage lasts forever is important.”
On a recent morning, under a turquoise-blue sky, Joel Sugg of San Angelo, Texas, and his brother Cal were stopped in a sport-utility vehicle in front of Stonefridge, taking in the sight.
“You know, there is a kind of genius to it,” Cal offered, saying he’d never seen anything quite like it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” his brother quipped. “It leaves me a bit cold.”
