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Google it. Check out the pictures. See the smiling faces of children, the jumbles of arms and legs clambering up and sliding down and scrambling back up again. You might even see a construction fence. And if you don’t, you will soon.

Halifax’s beloved Wave is about to get a facelift, a refurbishment that represents a symbolic truce, an admission and an easing of a near three-decade skirmish between the city powers that didn’t want people climbing on a piece of public art — and potentially falling off — and the city folk and tourists who couldn’t resist.

“I actually know somebody who fell off it last week,” says veteran city councilor Gloria McCluskey, with a raspy chuckle. “Some young people were climbing on it and fell.

“They are putting in a [new surface] to keep people from getting hurt.”

The revitalization of the Wave is part of a larger strategy intended to spiff up the Halifax waterfront. Plans call for the sculpture to be sandblasted, for any cracks in the steel and concrete body to be filled and for a rubberized surface to be installed around it ensuring that any climbers that do fall off land on cushioned ground.

“We like [the rubbery surface] as a texture and a design component as much as we do as a safety component,” says Jacob Ritchie, a planner with the Waterfront Development Corporation, the body responsible for the Wave’s $40,000 makeover. “And I think it recognizes that people could fall off when they are on top of it.