what about the plastic animals?

Lock, Stock, and Steer

Who said Texas wasn't a scenic state?  This beautiful giant steer was outside the Sirloin Stockade on the south side of Lockhart.

Little Abe On A Little Horse

Ha!  The weather was beautiful Saturday and I was in the mood to get out of town so off I went to Connecticut.  The "Circuit Rider" sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington is proudly displayed by the Bethel Public Library at one of the busiest intersections in town.  This was a small version of the sculpture.  It was maybe half the size, or smaller, than the versions in Syracuse, Lincoln City, Oregon, and at work.

Huntington donated the sculpture to the library in 1967.  Her studio was on a nearby estate owned by her husband, Archer M. Huntington.  After Anna's death in 1973 the estate was given to the state for use as a state park.  The entrance to the park, named after Archer's adoptive father, railroad magnate and ship builder Collis P. Huntington, is marked by two Anna Huntington sculptures:  A bear with two cubs and two howling wolves.

That's all the versions of the sculpture that I know about.  If anyone sees another one let me know.

Red Art, Blue Sky

Seen at the Storm King Art Center on a beautiful November Saturday last fall.

Welcome to Heavenly Harlem, NY

By Franco the Great at Jacob Restaurant on Lenox Ave.

Another Abe Lincoln on a Horse

Oh, this is exciting!  As some may recall, I included Lincoln City, Oregon in my Pacific Northwest trip to see this sculpture of Abe Lincoln on a Horse (I believe the proper name is The Circuit Rider).  In that post from August I mentioned that there were two more copies of the sculpture.  Yesterday I got to see one of them.

Abe Lincoln on a Horse stands on the lawn in front of Bray Hall on the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) in Syracuse.  Across the parking lot is Syracuse University's Carrier Dome.  The sculpture was moved to its present location a year-and-a-half ago.

I took the bottom photo at work this afternoon.  Our Abe on a Horse is much greener than the sculptures in Oregon and Syracuse!

Guess I've got to go to Connecticut to see the remaining copy.

Under the Aurora Bridge

There's a giant troll living under the Aurora Bridge in Seattle.  The bridge was built in 1929 and the Fremont Troll arrived in 1990, though there were earlier, unsubstantiated sightings.  Yes, the troll is holding an actual Volkswagen.

Since Thanksgiving is only a week away here's something to be thankful for:  I've only got a handful more things to write about this trip.  That's good because there's other things and other trips to write about.

Smokin' Joe

A tribute to Joe Frazier on St. Nicholas Ave. outside the 125th St. subway station.

The Grays Harbor Bull Snout

The little city of Aberdeen, Washington has been much kinder to the world than the world has been to Aberdeen.  Aberdeen was long a mill town but now there's not many mills remaining.  According to Wikipedia workers heard of mill closings in 2005 and 2009 not from Weyerhauser management but by listening to the radio.  And people wonder what motivates the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

In addition to the Melvins and Nirvana, Aberdeen has given the world photographer Lee Friedlander, painter Robert Motherwell, programmer and philanthropist Peter Norton, MacArthur Fellow and physics Nobel laureate Douglas Osheroff and George Scott, not the actor but the inventor of the self-cleaning oven (and who is not easy to find on the internet).  Alexander Calder spent a year working in Aberdeen and quarterback John Elway lived there as a small child.

Downtown Aberdeen had a rough charm but was clearly struggling to hang on to some vitality.  There were lots of empty lots and shuttered shops.  Among them, though, were these quirky sculptures like the Bull Snout, said to be a "rare and endangered species found only in Grays Harbor".  It is "thought to have originated when a bull stumbled into a swamp, making mad passionate love to a fish before expiring".  There was also a walk of fame, where I found out about the famous Aberdeenians.

I walked around downtown, took a few pictures before the sun got too low, and unsuccessfully looked for a good place to eat, settling instead for a popular, but not all that great, Mexican restaurant.

Speaking of bulls, or maybe a cow, check out the optical illusion on this holstein's face.  Is it real?

Lost Our Lease

I was in the West Village yesterday afternoon when I saw this writing going on in the sky.  It was  part of a work of art called "The Sky Is The Limit/NYC" by Kim Beck.  The air was so dry and the subsidence so great that I suspect the skywriting disappeared a lot quicker than the artist wanted it to.

I took a bunch of photos so I could make an animated gif.  That image is after the jump so readers don't have a seizure here.

Abe Lincoln on a Horse

 

In planning my trip I saw had to visit Lincoln City because they've got an Abe Lincoln on a Horse statue.  We've got one of those on campus!  I took a picture today so you could see him hidden away in the apple orchard.  There's also this post from 2006 that sort of explains the origin of the sculpture.

Lincoln City is on the Pacific and was incorporated on my fourth birthday when three neighboring cities and two unincorporated towns were consolidated.  The statue was given to the city in the same year so I'm guessing that it was a gift to honor the newly named city. 

Abe and his horse aren't any more visible in Lincoln City than they are on the Lamont campus.  Instead of getting pride of place on the Pacific Coast Highway, Abe sits in the back corner of the Elks Lodge parking lot two blocks away from the PCH.  There are at least two other copies of the sculpture.  One is at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse (to which the sculptress and her husband also donated 15,000 acres in the Adirondacks) and the other in front of the Bethel, Connecticut Public Library.

I arrived in Lincoln City about noon.  It was a bright, sunny day which meant I had to photograph the sculpture looking directly into the sun.  But for the magic of image editing software the top two photos would be silhouettes of Lincoln and his horse.