What Is That Thing? The 'Arc' At The Bend In The River

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — A permanent installation on the banks of the Hudson River is meant to elicit a unique, but somehow universal, emotional response when viewed from either the water or from the shore.

William Logan abstracted the "Arc" from stylized images of river boats and nautical moorings. The welded aluminum and steel sculpture was created with a center-of-gravity adjusted to give a sense of buoyancy that responds to the wind.

In 2014, the City of Peekskill held a competition for three works of art to be placed in the refurbished waterfront. The site that would eventually become the home of the Arc was at a grand bend in the river with a view of Bear Mountain inspiring the winning entry.

"I had been experimenting with large kinetic sculptures for several years by then and decided to submit a design suitable to the scale of the park and the landscape," Artist William Logan writes. "I had also designed and built several sailboats, one of which crossed the Atlantic and another which I sailed regularly by the site, so I was familiar with structures that came alive under the action of wind. I conceived a design that was a welded aluminum semi-circular arc twenty feet in diameter and supported flexibly by a heavy-duty chain on a 'mast' twenty feet tall. The center of gravity of the arc had been shifted by massive internal counterweights so the arc moved and behaved in counter-intuitive ways."

The landmark is a permanent gateway to the bend in the river at Peekskill Bay for those traveling by boat, railway or simply strolling the waterfront on foot.

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