Saturday Night Fever Firefighter Memorial

Buffalo, New York

In 1870 the Buffalo Volunteer Firemen's Association unveiled a memorial to its martyred members in the city's Forest Lawn Cemetery. It featured a six-foot-tall marble statue of a fireman.

Three decades passed. The marble statue wasn't looking so good, and more firemen had died fighting fires in Buffalo, a city whose buildings at the time were mostly built of wood. So in 1901 the marble statue was replaced with an elaborate, much larger monument, topped by a bronze fireman more than 12 feet tall. His elevated finger -- apparently indicating "There's the fire!" -- reaches almost 30 feet into the sky, and unintentionally mimics John Travolta's disco pose from the film Saturday Night Fever.

The 17-foot-high granite pedestal is engraved with names of all of the Buffalo firemen who had died up until 1901, and the monument is now surrounded by concentric circles of additional firefighter graves.