Seen outside the Rose Garden Arena, after the game

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I took this photo Saturday, January 19, after the basketball game. The Milwaukee Bucks won, not us. However, I am a fan, no matter what. 

We don't normally have fog like this, so I am happy to have had the opportunity to take a few photos out in it. Looking southwest towards the Willamette River and downtown Portland, you cannot see the Steel Bridge or the grain elevators--much less the lights of downtown--the fog's that thick. 

Bits I discovered online about the sculpture. 

• The Little Prince, by Ilan Averbuch. Copper and steel, 1995. 
• The Little Prince is a partially buried copper crown located at the south end of the arena in the Rose Quarter. It is a piece about imagination, desires and aspirations, conquests and struggles. It is the job of the viewer to create the story that goes along with the crown. Is it a victory and position of honor waiting to be claimed, or is there another story? Only the viewer can say.
• Ilan's inspiration for this piece was the "Little Prince" by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, in particular, the first chapter where he talks about his drawing of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant being misunderstood as a hat.
• Ilan Averbuch's "Little Prince" and the Portland Trailblazer's Rose Garden Arena. Portland, Oregon . . . legend has it that the crown will be stood upright when the Blazers with their next championship.
• The Little Prince, 1995, is a gigantic fallen crown, an image of a ruin of ancient majesty, of one-time splendor, and a version of another recurring theme in Averbuch’s work: the obsolescence of the monumental, former monuments in the soil, like ancient relics.
• The Little Prince (Ilan Averbuch, 1996) is a copper crown, standing 15 feet tall in front of the Rose Garden. Inspired by the French children's story by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, the artist asks that you use your imagination to think of a story behind the crown. The crown is resting on its side perhaps waiting as a prize to be claimed or as a symbol of a triumph to come.

Here's another view of it. It's on a bit of an elevation from street level, the height of which is well-represented here by its juxtaposition with the bottom windows of that double-decker bus from Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub which is in downtown PDX. Another photo of "The Little Prince" that I took on October 16, 2010. And one more, with a part of the Rose Garden Arena visible on the other side of it.