20-Foot-Tall Eiffel Tower and 8-Foot-Tall Indian
Paris, Michigan
During the 1930s, Paris Park had temporary bunkhouses that sheltered government workers for the WPA. The bunkhouses were eventually torn down, but the metal frames from the workers' beds remained, stored in barns.
Decades passed. Then, in 1980, high school students from the Mecosta-Osceola Career Center in nearby Big Rapids -- or from Chippewa Hills High School in sort-of-nearby Remus (accounts vary) -- discovered the beds and decided that the metal would make good raw material for an engineering and welding project.
As Dale Cox, the assistant warden of the park, explained to us, "They learned how to chop 'em up." The result is a nice Eiffel Tower replica (in Paris Park -- get it?) in a wooded glen just past the park's fish hatchery. It's less striking than perhaps it once was, as the trees around it have grown much, much taller than the tower.
On the other side of the fish hatchery stands a mysterious 2-D Indian -- a Chippewa Chief, according to Dale -- that was carved in 1937, as a WPA project, by a Bulgarian wood carver. Dale couldn't remember the gentleman's name.
Just north of the park, on the west side of Northland Drive, is a detached white garage on which is a sign, "Home of Dynamite The Circus Clown." We doubt that Dynamite had anything to do with the tower or the Indian, but we thought that he deserved a plug.