Kelly tribute withstands stormy disagreements. (News).

Groundbreaking dancer/choreographer Gene Kelly will be forever singing in the rain when a fourteen-foot bronze statue of the late film star, rendered by sculptor Susan Wagner, is planted on a traffic island in his native Pittsburgh. A $500,000 fund-raising campaign is expected to be launched soon to place him there. But figuring out where to locate and how to render this beloved native son hasn't been easy.

"When the project was conceived, the economy was booming," says Aviva Radbord, KDKA-TV's public-affairs producer/weekend assignment editor, who has spearheaded the venture since 1999. "Now that we have the site, the economy has soured. The project will take longer to complete than it would have two years ago." She hopes the statue, requiring nine months to finish once funding is secured, will be on its pedestal within a few years.

At the outset, Radbord and her twenty-member committee of business and media leaders envisioned the famous image of Kelly, umbrella in hand, swinging from a lit lamppost in Pittsburgh's Cultural District.

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the downtown real estate developer that oversees the district, said that there wasn't enough room and suggested a spot in a nearby office tower plaza. But "we would have been required to commission the sculptor whose works are already in the plaza," Radbord says, noting that the committee, impressed with Wagner's initial design, chose her from the pool of applicants. Three additional downtown venues were considered and dismissed before Deputy Mayor Sal Sirabella suggested the Liberty Avenue traffic island, which is immediately visible to visitors entering the downtown area.

Arguments about the island's inaccessibility to pedestrians and related safety issues ended when the Pittsburgh City Council unanimously approved the site in early December and deeded the land to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, a private agency responsible for landscaping and maintenance. The next day, however, a local newspaper ran an opinion poll that provided fodder for its columnists and editors, who questioned the decision to approve the site and offered relocation suggestions. In mid-December, Thomas Sokolowski, director of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum, maligned the committee's choice of Wagner, a Pittsburgh-based artist who previously created statues of baseball legends Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell for the city. According to Radbord, the committee will revisit neither issue.

Kelly, who died in 1996, taught dance in Pittsburgh at his family's Gene Kelly Studio of Dance and at Beth Shalom before opting for Broadway and then Hollywood. In 1951 he won a special Academy Award for choreography. The next year he starred as Don Lockwood in the MGM hit Singin' in the Rain, with its famous drenched dance scene. Radbord has acquired permission from Warner Brothers/Turner Entertainment Company of Burbank, California, and from the Kelly estate to capture Lockwood's glorious feeling in bronze. And Kelly's widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, will have final approval of the statue's design.