For a decade, the 62-foot-high steel Springfield Flame statue in Gateway has loomed over a barren city-owned tract of sun-bleached bark mulch and a few weeds.
That’s about to change.
Later this summer, the city will landscape the quarter-acre statue site, repair damaged lighting and install a lit 6 ½ -foot-tall, 20-foot-long sign that reads “Welcome to Springfield, Oregon.”
The upgrades on the property at Beltline Road and Gateway Street may help the statue compete with the Gateway district’s sea of retail facades, commercial logos and business pole signs.
The city’s work will likely get plenty of attention. The Interstate 5/Beltline interchange handles 100,000 or more vehicles a day.
Springfield delayed making the improvements for so long because it wanted whatever it did to mesh with adjacent commercial development by developer Richard Boyles, says Niel Laudati, Springfield’s assistant city manager. Boyles’ concept initially included a possible hotel but eventually morphed into what we see now: a Chick-fil-A (opened in 2024), a Happy’s Drive-Thru Car Wash (opened in 2025) and the under-construction Discount Tire store.
The statue signage design, lighting and landscaping will cost $76,000, all covered by local hotel/motel room taxes, says Springfield spokesperson Elyse Ditzel. The statue itself, by sculptor Devin Laurence Field, was paid for with $236,000 in local room tax dollars and state funding.
No plaza
The signage/landscaping will be more modest than the city’s plan a decade ago to create a public plaza around the statue.
“Initially it was more of a plaza [concept], thinking that there would be different stores in there,” Laudati says.
The site, with the near-constant din from heavy traffic along Beltline and Gateway, might not be the ideal spot for a relaxing plaza.
With Boyles’ current store configuration and mix, public access to a plaza would be difficult, Laudati says. Now, the statue site “will be an extension of landscaping that is around Chick-fil-A. That gives us a great opportunity to partner with Chick-fil-A and share maintenance and water costs.”
The city is opting for a low-key welcome sign because “you can’t take away from the sculpture,” Laudati says.
Motel and gas station long gone
The southwest corner of Beltline and Gateway has been in transition for decades. Up to about 20 years ago, it housed a motel and gas station. Those were torn down and the property was used as a staging area by the Oregon Department of Transportation for the Beltline/Interstate-5 intersection rebuild in 2014-15. The Flame was erected in 2016.
The city bought the three-quarter-acre Flame land from ODOT in 2020 for $345,000, then in 2021 sold half an acre of the parcel, at a pro-rated price, to Boyles for $225,000, leaving the city with the quarter-acre plot the Flame stands on now.
The city didn’t need the surplus land, which lacked legal vehicular access from Gateway Street, the Springfield City Council had decided.
The statue has “become a part of Springfield that is well known and looks great,” Laudati says. At its annual block party in September, the city will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the installation, he says.
The statue lights up at night and is meant to draw attention to the commercial district’s hotels and motels, sculptor Field said during the installation. “The concept was to create a welcoming beacon to announce the north end of the city, create a sense of place as a new landmark and leave a light on for travelers arriving from I-5 into the hospitality district,” he told his alma mater, the University of Oregon.
Gateway has held true to its car-centric function. It hosts at least nine hotels or motels and about two-dozen fast-food restaurants and other eateries.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.