Patrick Melroy: The Art of Santa Barbara’s Minor Monuments

On the corner of Micheltorena Street and Gillespie Street, a small concrete obelisk was discarded by a construction team. It stood around four feet tall, with a pointed top and some minor chipping along the side, an utterly insignificant piece of rock between the sidewalk and the curb. This small pole was destined to join a pile of other concrete rubble, forgotten by history and memory alike, yet when Santa Barbara artist Patrick Melroy stumbled across this scene, he saw something worth saving.

The pole, as Melroy would later discover, was a remnant from postal boxes used in the early 20th century, when boxes were hung from these concrete obelisks. When the U.S. Postal Service made the switch to the iconic free-standing blue bins, these postal poles were left without letters and without purpose — yet the obelisk remained.

“I’m really fascinated by little monuments, monuments that just get turned into nothing,” said Melroy. “They get removed as the world encroaches on them.” He likened them to a Thomasson, a term coined by Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa to describe useless relics of structures, buildings, and environments — staircases to nowhere, windows to nothing, beautiful in their obsoleteness. For Melroy, the postal pole was a triumph, a vestige of a forgotten artist’s craftsmanship. “With the tools that they had over 100 years ago, they were making these really pristine, beautiful objects” worthy of a second chance at life. He recalls repeating, “I think I can fix it.” So, he took it home with him.