Jinxed 9-11 Statue in Trouble Again

July 4, 2009

In late 2007, sculptor Stan Watts finally erected his large statue of three 18-foot-tall firefighters raising a U.S. flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center — literally, with real rubble from Ground Zero scattered at their feet.

Watts had worked on the sculpture for five years. The 8-ton bronze, titled To Lift A Nation, had originally been intended for New York City; then Washington, DC; then Colorado Springs, Colorado. But all three cities rejected it as too big, or too impractical, or too much of a tourist attraction.

Now it stands on the grounds of the FEMA National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland, which means that not many people from New York, Washington, of Colorado will ever see it.

The statue’s dedication marked the end of its saga — until recently, when it was reported that the statue’s construction was financed by investor fraud. A company named Coadum Advisors gave Watts $300,000 in 2006 to build the statue, which then was valued at $4.8 million and which Coadum hoped to write off its taxes. The SEC now says that Coadum was just a Ponzi scheme, using money from new investors to pay off earlier ones and pocketing the difference.

The SEC can’t seize Coadum’s almost $19 million in offshore accounts. But it’s seized the statue, and is looking for someone to buy it so that Coadum’s investors can get some of their money back. One good thing about To Lift A Nation being so big: it can’t be shipped offshore, and it probably isn’t going anywhere else.

Sections: Attraction News, Statues
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More and More Rushmore

July 3, 2009

On Fourth of July weekend, All-American vacationers from coast-to-coast proudly cut out of work early so they can flock to our nation’s most treasured patriotic sights. But don’t fret if you can’t make it to a national monument; many of the most iconic and pride-inducing ones have been reproduced over and over and over (with varied degrees of success and imagination). For example, there’s Mount Rushmore. If you don’t have the wherewithal to schlep to the original, perhaps one of the following facsimiles can satisfy the urge to gaze upon massive (and not-so-massive) carved presidential faces (and the mugs of other awe-inspiring figures such as Barney Rubble).

Legoland in Carlsbad, California constructed a version out of an-impossible-to-even-think-about quantity of clever interlocking plastic bricks. This sculpture is even craggier than the original, with added features such as George Washington’s wandering eyes, and a miniature maintenance crew that cleans out his right ear with a Lego Q-Tip.

Flintstones Bedrock City theme park and camping resort in Custer, South Dakota features “Mount Rockmore.” Their heady foursome is Fred, Barney, Dino, and the rather obscure “founder” of Bedrock City, Mr. Granitebilt.

Another popular parody is the one adjacent to the parking lot at the Hollywood Wax Museum in Branson, Missouri. It stars the stony and very approximate visages of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Charlie Chaplin (though he actually looks more like Oliver Hardy).

Sometimes simply juxtaposing four Chief Executive noggins is sufficient for a Rushmore-like rush. In Houston, David Adickes, sculptor of oversized heroes, has a side-of-the-highway arrangement nicknamed “Mount Rush Hour.” His Barack Obama head has just completed an exhaustive tour of the United States — with frequent updates on Twitter.

Now let’s say that you do make it to South Dakota, but traffic jams, sore butts, and the harrowing vision of endless lines and cranky crowds causes you to give up on getting to Keystone.

Do you turn around and head for home with nothing to show for your trouble? No way!

Stop at mega-tourist trap Wall Drug, which offers a miniature Mount Rushmore photo op for your convenience. Also, bathrooms. Or check out Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, where you can take a picture in front of their interpretation…and then go see a snake show or some alligator taunting. [Post by Anne D. Bernstein]

Sections: Statues
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Hitler Head Trash Can: Spoils for USA

June 27, 2009

The National Infantry Museum has moved into a new, $100 million facility (complete with an IMAX theater) in Fort Benning, Georgia. The splashy highlight of the museum is its “Last 100 Yards” exhibit, where visitors can walk up a slope accompanied by attacking U.S. soldiers from the past 200 years.

We enjoy immersive fake combat as much as any American, but we were concerned with the fate of some of the exhibits from the old museum, which closed in 2008. Was the Hitler Head trash can considered too distasteful to make the move? How about the monument marking the grave of Calculator the Dog?

“The monument hasn’t been moved yet, but there is a plan to do that,” said Cyndy Cerbin, the museum’s director of communications. “We just have to raise a little bit more money.”

The less-bulky Hitler Head has been relocated — along with Hermann Goring’s diamond-encrusted field marshal baton — and both are featured attractions in the Spoils of War exhibit, which Cyndy agreed was “a favorite” in the museum.

Another old exhibit, a captured portrait of Saddam Hussein that was set into the floor of the old museum so that visitors could walk on it, is currently in storage. It will likely never again be displayed with the same glee that it was in 2003. But the new museum, which is already being called the Smithsonian of the Army, does have the sleeping quarters of Gen. George Patton and Ulysses S. Grant’s liquor cabinet, so there’s still plenty to see here.

Sections: Attraction News
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Industrial Strength Sights

June 26, 2009

A factory closing is a sad affair: breadwinners are left reeling, communities go shrinking, and the sight of an empty architectural behemoth hovering over the landscape reminds us daily of the less lovely side of capitalism. With the increasing pace of company restructuring, outsourcing, and just plain “don’t slam the door on your way out”-ing, the gumption that transforms obsolete industrial sites into cheerful tourist attractions is more important than ever.

Art and abandoned factories are a perfect match. The predictable choice has been to turn inactive derelicts into sprawling museums capable of housing the most massive of sculptures and most puzzling of installations (see MASS MoCA and Dia: Beacon). A related approach is to subdivide them into a beehive-like complex of art studios and bestow a plainspoken generic name on the whole shebang — Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory and Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory come to mind.

But there are more innovative approaches to aesthetic factory recycling. 5Pointz (“The Institute of Higher Burnin’”) in Long Island City, NY is the world’s “premier graffitti mecca”: a 200,000 square foot factory completely covered with layers of eye-popping aerosol creations. It even has a curator named Jonathan Cohen (“Meres One”) who plans to do some fund-raising and eventually turn it into an official grant-gettin’ museum. For now, you can see it from the elevated 7 train.

Billy Tripp’s MindField in Brownsville, Tennessee is a gigantic steel sculpture that looks a bit like an electrical transformer. It incorporates a spherical water tower from a defunct factory into its design– dismantled and transported to the site by the artist himself. The twisty towers incorporate a tribute to his parents and pithy sayings such as “I support gay rights tho personally I like girls.” It is the largest work of art in Tennessee and still growing.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has elaborate plans for renovating parts of the old Bethlehem Works, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with a slots casino built on one end of the huge rusting property.

But if you prefer the beauty of nature, as opposed to the man-made self-conscious inspiration of “art,” just leave your factory alone and it may eventually turn it into a daytripper destination without any help at all. In warm weather, crowds gather nightly at the Hubbell Memorial Chimney in Northville, NY to witness the arrival of hundreds of chimney swifts . The birds fly 7,000 miles from the Amazon jungle and show up on May 6th each year to take up residence in the old factory chimney.

To the delight of bird and human alike, celebratory fried dough is often served. [Post by Anne D. Bernstein]

Sections: Trends
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Animal Magnetism: Roadside Poll Results

June 25, 2009

In a recent online poll, RoadsideAmerica.com asked site visitors:

“Which taxidermy wonder would you travel farthest to see?”

We couldn’t present America’s full breadth of stuffed dead exhibits, so we chose a tiny sampling of more common oddities, and a few true rarities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, more than a quarter of respondents will not go out of their way to see the hides of dead creatures wrapped around stuffing and frames and sewed into comical poses. 25.8% of them think it’s “Disgusting!”

However, mutation triumphed in the end. The Merman/Fiji Mermaid, owing some clout, no doubt, to its P. T. Barnum pedigree, garnered 31% of the vote.

Chipmunks Play Cards found 13.8% of respondents ready to gamble part of a road trip to see them in their various under-hyped locations. White Squirrels Shoot Hoops grabbed 13% of interest, though it’s hard to discern whether it’s because of the rarity of seeing all-white creatures starring in this sport.

The 8-legged pig found a following among 10% of respondents. Good thing that it’s not more popular, because we can’t tell you exactly where that porcine spider scuttled to after the Thunderbird Museum, Hatfield, WI closed a decade ago.

Is the detour appeal of the 2-headed calf seriously waning? Seems so, since only 6% of voters would go the extra mile to see one (vs. the other oddities). Perhaps the 2-headed calf is the Starbucks of the Freak Animal World, too readily available at every half-baked county museum and truck stop. And in an age of Octomoms, is two heads even noteworthy?

Sections: Poll, Trends
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Furniture Fuels Roadside Funtasms

June 25, 2009

We’ve long been impressed with Jordan’s Furniture stores in Massachusetts, which offer mad mixes of water shows and Mardi Gras and thrill rides in places that sell, basically, furniture.

They seemed like unique extremes in the world of house-outfitting retail, which had already produced a giant chest of drawers that seemed, by comparison, more of a throwback to an era when a big chair was enough to assure marketing success.

But maybe Jordan’s Furniture isn’t so unique after all. Maybe there’s something about selling furniture — some wood beetle that burrows into the brain, perhaps — that drives owners to gaze over the pier wall into a demented furniturescape.

Take the Canadian firm of Leon’s Furniture Limited. That company has just unveiled “Leon’s Living Room” in Welland, Ontario, a life-sized outdoor bronze sculpture of a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, and a seated company founder Ablan Leon, with whom “residents and visitors are invited to interact,” according to a company press release.

Extreme for Canada? Stranger still is news from Houston, Texas, where Gallery Furniture recently had its warehouse and showroom destroyed in a very mysterious $20 million arson fire. Its owner, Jim McIngvale, was already in the news for boycotting his taxes, and has refused to hire a lawyer because “I would rather cut off my arms than destroy my life’s work” and has said that the showroom’s reopening “will be a triumph of good over evil.”

As part of that reopening, McIngvale has announced — through his Twitter account — that he has hired an artist to “make a sculpture from remnants of the warehouse,” which will be unveiled on July 4.

We hope that it’s something odd, or at least as big as the giant chest of drawers.

Sections: Attraction News, Canada, Trends
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