The small bronze feet are all that remained of the Sadako and the Thousand Cranes statue at Peace Park in Seattle's University District. They're surrounded by large bushes of fragrant lavender on a recent Monday morning. Yellow, orange and blue paper cranes are scattered at the site.
Jonathan Betz-Zall, a member of the Quaker Church, University Friends Meeting, said he's at the site weekly. He and the church are helping with the effort to replace the statue.
"Almost everything that's left out in the open around here gets taken — that's just the fact of urban life. But people are also leaving things, like I see a number of artificial flowers around her feet," Betz-Zall said.
The statue commemorated Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who died of leukemia 10 years after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. While hospitalized, she folded 1,300 cranes, a symbol of peace, hope and healing in Japanese culture.
Betz-Zall said that symbolism translated in Seattle when the statue was erected in 1990.
"Right away, people started bringing and hanging strings of paper cranes all over the statue, to the point that oftentimes you could not see the statue. It was totally covered," he said.
The statue was sawed off at the ankles and stolen in July 2024. Even though it was admired by many, its disappearance is a reminder that public art in the city is not immune to theft or vandalism.
'Publicly owned cultural assets'
Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture recently wrote a blog post about how to report stolen bronze public art. It comes after 14 reports of artwork that have either been stolen or vandalized since 2020, including the statue of Sadako. Most of the pieces are believed to have been sold to scrap yards, and there often aren’t leads to suspects in these cases.
This past May, a petal was sawed off the tall Naramore Fountain located downtown near 6th Avenue and Seneca Street. It was created by the late Seattle artist George Tsutakawa and installed in 1966. It’s part of the city’s public art collection, but it was removed and is being kept in storage.
It's Tsutakawa’s second piece of work that has been tampered with since 2020. That's when his Memorial Gates sculpture at the Washington Park Arboretum was stolen and destroyed. Two years later, Tsutakawa's son, Gerard, recreated and replaced the sculptures.
Jason Huff, the city's public art collection manager, said the Tsutakawa family is aware of the vandalism on the fountain.
"There's sadness and, you know, outrage at this," he said. "But it's just sort of an understanding and knowing that we're working with them, and working to find solutions for the future so that we can preserve this."
Huff said the city aims to repair and replace the statue, and is working with the parks department to figure out the best way to do that.
Another incident happened in July on the campus of the University of Washington. Strips of copper were pried out of a piece installed last year titled Nourish / Enrich / Nurse Log. The artwork is made out of cement and created to look like tree rings. According to a UW police report, 10 lbs of copper went missing sometime around July 23.
The Washington State Arts Commission maintains this piece. Janae Huber, the state agency's collection manager, said the copper was stamped with intricate designs.
"There is a pattern, a stamped pattern in that copper that is a unique pattern that is not easily replaceable for us," she said.
Prior to this incident, the state art collection had not experienced theft since 2004 at Poulsbo Middle School. That piece was created by the late artist Phillip Levine. He sculpted three bronze figures that depicted a person getting ready to do a flip, another doing a handstand and a final figure landing the flip.
Two of those figures were stolen. The remaining figure has been reconceived and is now called Gymnast. It is not currently on display.
"Anytime we have a loss of those, it's not an offense against me as an individual. These are publicly owned cultural assets that we want to take care of," Huber said.
Seattle's Office of Arts and Culture has asked people to report missing or damaged artwork by calling (206) 684-7171 or via its Find It, Fix It app. The agency responsible for the piece can then send a message to alert sites that accept scrap metal, in the hopes of recovering it.
Sadako renewal project
Back at the Peace Park in the University District, Sadako’s bronze feet will be attached to a new aluminum sculpture, created by Seattle artist Saya Moriyasu.
Moriyasu said Sadako will be depicted smiling. Her hands will be stretched out so that people can hang cranes from them. And she'll be wearing a yellow kimono, similar to one her parents gifted her after she was diagnosed with leukemia.
“So I thought, 'Well, why don't I put a kimono on Sadako,'" Moriyasu said. "But let's imagine her as the young girl that never got sick and was enjoying her kimono. And feeling the freedom of the kind of wing-like feelings of the kimono, which kind of also reflects the cranes that she was folding."
The piece will also feature three ginkgo leaves standing over the figure. Moriyasu said she wanted to include the ginkgo trees because they survived the atomic bomb and became a symbol of hope and resilience in Japan.
She said the plan also aims to make the site more inviting by including benches and lights. Moriyasu said this is a chance to reimagine the area, and pay homage to the park's founder Floyd Schmoe, a Quaker and peace activist.
"It's a very, very sad situation that it arose from," she said. "But it's an opportunity to create space for people to gather more and to kind of reinvigorate, hopefully, the message of peace that Floyd Schmoe worked so hard to create, and to make this a special spot once again."
In 1988, Schmoe received the Hiroshima Peace Center's Kiyoshi Tanimoto Peace Award, and donated the more than $4,000 prize toward the creation of Peace Park. The Sadako and the Thousand Cranes statue was commissioned and funded by the now-defunct Fratelli's Ice Cream Company.
Moriyasu's version of the statue is being crowdfunded. A campaign called the Sadako Renewal Project aims to raise at least $300,000 to pay for the work and to maintain it for a couple decades.
Jonathan Betz-Zall, with University Friends Meeting, said he's hoping small donations get the project across the finish line, so that more people feel a shared sense of responsibility for the statue.
"If all these people contributed to it, then I believe that there's going to be all this psychic energy, kind of standing guard around it, upholding it, spreading the message," he said.
The plan is to get the replacement statue installed by August 2026, in time to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Betz-Zall said if there was one word to describe what he's feeling about the project, it's "solidarity."
