MARQUETTE – The statue of the 17th-century French Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette was smeared with red paint in November 2012, and then again with green paint in June 2013.

“That was the trigger,” said Tami Dawidowski, president of the Marquette Beautification and Restoration Committee. “We decided that someone needed to restore it and clean it and take care of that piece of art.”

The committee had the bronze monument cleaned and restored, and then cleaned again, after the second bout of vandalism, and installed some security cameras and lighting.

“All that is monitored by the Marquette Police Department, so they know what’s going on in that park now,” said Jerry Irby, chairman of the subcommittee overseeing the park and statue restoration. “The (Marquette Beautification and Restoration) Committee has done that whole thing to make sure this is protected.”

All that work was part of phase one, Irby said, noting the community support and donations that allowed for completion of the project.

Phase two calls for a complete redesign of Father Marquette Park to make it more connected to the downtown area and accessible for everyone.

“Our group has always looked for ways to beautify Marquette, and we’ve done that through starting with planters downtown, which evolved into Petunia Pandemonium, which has just grown all the way down the street,” Dawidowski said. “And that brought us pretty much up to Father Marquette Park, and I guess that’s our next vision.”

So the committee hired architect Bill Sanders, of the Marquette firm Sanders & Czapski Associates, PLLC, to create a concept design for the park.

“The starting place for design was the outdoor accessibility guidelines for outdoor developed areas, which is a new (Americans with Disabilities Act) standard,” Sanders said. “But going beyond that, we tried to make it universally accessible, which essentially is – if we can make it flatter, we’ll make it flatter – things we can do that are above and beyond that base plane of ADA, is what we would do.”

Some of the park’s current stone path would be retained and restored, but flatter concrete paths leading to a new platform surrounding the monument and an upper viewing area would be installed.

As the monument sits atop an elevated rock outcrop overlooking Lakeshore Boulevard and Lake Superior, paved pathways would be set connecting the park with Front Street, Baraga Avenue, Founders Landing and the multi-use trails below.

Plans also call for a second observation deck to be set at a mid-level height between that of the statue and the lake front.

“You’re going to have kiosks around that explain different things about the history of Father Marquette,” Irby said. “We want the students, we want the people to understand what this individual meant to the development of the Great Lakes.”

The Marquette statue was a gift to the city in 1898 from Peter White. It’s a replica of an original that’s made of marble created by Italian-born sculptor Gaetano Trentanove.

While the original sits in Washington, D.C.’s Statuary Hall, a second bronze replica is located on Mackinac Island. But the Marquette monument is the only one with reliefs on the side, which depict early Native Americans, Irby said.

“This is a statue that depicts the serenity, it depicts the strength and it depicts the character of Father Marquette, which we want to bring back to the glory of what it should be when you walk into this park,” Irby said.

The committee recently made a presentation to the Marquette City Commission and asked for city staff assistance in preparing a grant request from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Trust Fund.

While commissioners directed city staff to assist with the application, they asked the committee also seek formal support from the Marquette Downtown Development Authority and the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board.

Irby said the committee would meet with the two entities soon and seek final approval from the city commission by March 30, shortly before the grant application’s April 1 deadline.

The beautification and restoration committee estimated a local match requirement of about $56,000, with the total cost of phase two expected at roughly $200,000.

Irby said the committee has already put around $18,000 into restoring the statue during phase one, all of it community money.

“That’s people coming forward with donations; no government money,” he said, adding that he hopes the local match contribution for phase two would come from community donations, as well.

Irby said the committee has received some financial commitments already, but wants to give all community members an opportunity to donate to the cause.

“We just want people to understand that there’s an opportunity now to move forward with the restoration of this park …,” Irby said. “If the kids want to go out and have a penny drive and come up with $50, that’s just as important to us as the $5,000 contribution. We want everybody involved with this as they see fit.”

Anyone interested in joining to the committee’s cause can attend one of its meetings or send contributions to P.O. Box 334, Marquette, MI 49855.

For more information, visit www.mqtbeautification.org.

Ryan Jarvi can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242.