Two years ago, San Diego got money to restore a beloved statue. Locals are still waiting to ‘see our history back.’

Nearly two years after city leaders announced state funding for it, little progress has been made toward a long-promised restoration of a historic sculpture in a beloved Mountain View park.

For community advocates like Jeffrey Hayes who have pushed for years to install a recreation of the artwork known as “The Black Family,” it’s discouraging, and feels emblematic of a history of neglect.

“All my friends were telling me that I couldn’t get it done, because it’s the city — and it was true,” he said.

For decades, “The Black Family” stood at the edge of Mountain View Park, now Neal Petties Mountain View Community Park, honoring local football star and community hero Neal Petties.

The six-foot wood sculpture, built in 1974 by the late Rossie Wade, then a student at the San Diego College of Continuing Education’s Educational Cultural Complex, symbolized the neighborhood’s pride, family and belonging through a family of four figures reaching for the sky.

Years of weathering and vandalism led to the sculpture’s complete disintegration, leaving only a similarly worn-down plaque and red-brick pedestal.

Hayes, a longtime Mountain View resident who saw the sculpture go up decades ago, has since seen it vandalized and has returned to clean up the deteriorated sculpture. “I went and cleaned the side all up, got some paint remover, took it back to the brick,” Hayes said.

The disrepair prompted Hayes — joined by Wade’s daughters, Carole and Lynn, and other neighbors — to spend years pushing for its restoration.

Despite interest from the city, for a long time no commitment or planning emerged, leading then-Assemblymember Akilah Weber to help move the efforts along.

In August 2023, Mayor Todd Gloria announced that his office and San Diego’s state lawmakers had secured nearly $25 million in state funding for “critically important projects in San Diego communities” — including $195,000 to restore the sculpture.

“Taken together, these projects will help us make neighborhoods safer; address homelessness; improve our parks, libraries and streets; and expand housing opportunities,” he said.

Two months later, Weber and local leaders gathered at the park to detail plans for the restoration: It would be carried out by welding students at the San Diego College of Continuing Education, led by their professor, Mike Bradbury — and they would also restore a smaller version of the same sculpture Wade had completed for the school.

“It felt so lovely,” Hayes said. “That was a great feeling to know that, you know, I get to see our history back.”

So far, he’s only gotten to see part of it.

The college’s replica — separate from the park’s, and entirely funded by the school — debuted on a parade float in the 42nd annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade the following January. It is now on display on the college’s campus.

The team expected work to begin on the restoration of the park’s sculpture quickly after — especially once the City Council approved the allocation of state funding to the park landmark weeks later, in March 2024.

That was the expectation of a community group that supports the park, too, emails reviewed by The San Diego Union-Tribune show.

The Neal Petties Mountain View Community Recreation Group, which meets once a month, periodically emails the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture asking for updates on the project. In the spring of 2024, the city’s chief of civic art strategies, Christine Jones, replied that the city anticipated the restoration project to begin that fall and be complete by fall 2025.

But no construction work is underway, and the restoration is not even yet in the pre-construction phase — to the frustration of residents, including Wade’s daughters, who contacted the group in February for an update, not understanding the delay.

“We are currently in the procurement phase with the San Diego Continuing Education Foundation to proceed with further design development and collaboration with Rossie Wade’s daughters and the Mountain View group this spring. Additionally, we are preparing an agreement to obtain written permission from Rossie Wade’s daughters, the copyright holders of the original artwork, to replicate it,” Jones said in her next email to the group.

“We anticipate completing the sculpture fabrication and installation by the end of 2025,” she added.

The city reached out to Wade’s daughters soon thereafter and got their permission to recreate it — leaving the final step to finalize an agreement with the college.

But as of last week, the city had yet to finalize paperwork with the school and still is in the “planning and procurement phase of the project,” city spokesperson Racquel Vasquez told the Union-Tribune in an email.

The city’s departments of contracting and cultural affairs expect to complete the paperwork, which includes standard requirements like insurance, before the summer ends, she added.

That will finally release the funds to the college so its students can begin work.

For now, although the remnants of “The Black Family” remain untouched, trash and growing weeds have gradually replaced the figures of the sculpture that once stood at the edge of the park.

And residents say the lack of progress reflects a longer history of neglect by the city of both the park and the community.

A recent refurbishment of the sports courts took years to achieve, forcing visitors to play on cracked pavement before the work was completed in March.

Many of the other city projects that were funded with some of the same $24.8 million tranche of state funding — including the Ocean Beach Pier replacement, a San Ysidro Library expansion, a new lifeguard garage facility in La Jolla, and design work on a Hodges Dam replacement — are already either underway or in pre-construction phases.

In Mountain View, along with the sculpture restoration project, the city is working on designing upgrades to improve park accessibility, among other planned revitalization, Vasquez said in the email.

Until then, residents are awaiting any updates on the sculpture restoration — wishing to return an important symbol of hope to its designated home.

“I think that’ll bring a lot more structure to our neighborhood and our people — bring a lot more unity,” Hayes said. “That’s what I’m looking for.”