Why Is This Here? (12 Photos)

Odd landmarks and the reasons they stand where they do

A starship in a prairie town, Superman outside a courthouse and Lenin on a Seattle street corner all look like accidents. None of them is. Each of these twelve landmarks has a plain local reason for being there, from a town’s name to a spinach harvest to a new interstate.

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🖖 Starship Monument — Vulcan, Alberta, Canada 🇨🇦

A prairie farm town with a starship in it needs a reason, and Vulcan has one. A railway surveyor named the town after the Roman god of fire in 1910; decades later Star Trek fans started arriving because Vulcan is also Spock’s home planet. The town answered with a five-tonne, almost ten-meter ship built by a local welding shop and unveiled in 1995.

📷 Photo: Canoe1967 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

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🔨 The Skinny House — By Nathan Thomas Seely in Mamaroneck, New York, USA 🇺🇸

This house is ten feet wide because it had to fit on a 12.5-foot strip of land. After the Depression cost builder Nathan Seely his home and business, his neighbor gave him a narrow strip between their two houses, and Seely built on it in 1931–1932. He built it from salvaged materials.

📷 Photo: Anthony22 at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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🪨 Casa do Penedo — Fafe, Portugal 🇵🇹

This house is wedged between boulders because the boulders are the house. It was built between four large rocks, starting with the roof, so it would fit into the hillside. Work began in 1972 and took about two years; it started as a holiday home and is now a small museum, with no electricity even though a wind farm stands next to it.

📷 Photo: Feliciano Guimarães / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🏛️ Leaning Tower of Niles — Niles, Illinois, USA 🇺🇸

This leaning tower in a Chicago suburb is a disguise. Industrialist Robert Ilg had the half-size replica of Pisa’s tower finished in 1934 for a park for his employees, and it hid a water tank. Niles and Pisa became sister cities in 1991.

📷 Photo: Paul R. Burley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🧺 The Basket Building — By the Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, USA 🇺🇸

A seven-story picnic basket stands beside the highway in Newark because this was the home of a basket company. Founder Dave Longaberger put his favorite basket on the architects’ table and said “This is what I want,” and at the end of 1997 his staff moved into the $30 million headquarters. The 150-ton handles have heating inside so ice cannot build up and crash through the roof.

📷 Photo: Niagara66 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🤠 Eiffel Tower With a Cowboy Hat — Paris, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

A town called Paris eventually needed a tower. Paris, Texas, built its replica in 1993, three years after Paris, Tennessee, built one, and made it a little taller in a competitive spirit; a shiny red cowboy hat went on top in 1998. Local union welders built it.

📷 Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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🚩 Lenin — By Emil Venkov in Seattle, Washington, USA 🇺🇸

Seattle has a 16-foot Lenin because an American English teacher in Slovakia spotted it. The bronze was unveiled in Poprad, Czechoslovakia, in 1988; after the Velvet Revolution, Lewis Carpenter found it in a scrapyard, bought it and shipped it home to Washington state. It has stood in Fremont since 1995, still waiting for a buyer.

💡 History Fact: Carpenter died in a car accident in 1994, a year before the statue reached Fremont, and the Fremont Chamber of Commerce agreed to hold it in trust for his family until a buyer is found.

📷 Photo: Aab254 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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🥊 Rocky Balboa — By Boris Staparac in Žitište, Serbia 🇷🇸

Žitište, a struggling Serbian village, wanted something to get it noticed, so it chose Rocky. A local citizens’ association pushed for the statue, which went up in 2007 with the approval of the sculptor of Philadelphia’s original; Lonely Planet later listed it among the world’s most bizarre monuments.

📷 Photo: Зинтарис / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🌽 Jolly Green Giant — Blue Earth, Minnesota, USA 🇺🇸

The Giant went up when the new interstate began to pass Blue Earth by. A local radio station owner wanted something to pull drivers off I-90, and local businesses paid for it; the company had a canning plant in town. The 55.5-foot fiberglass figure was bolted down in July 1979.

📷 Photo: Justin M. Skiba / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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🦸 Superman Statue — Metropolis, Illinois, USA 🇺🇸

Superman guards the county courthouse in a small river town because of its name. Superman’s adopted city is Metropolis, and in 1972 the Illinois legislature passed a resolution commending this real Metropolis for its “Project Superman”. The 15-foot painted bronze now stands on Superman Square, and the local newspaper is called The Metropolis Planet.

💡 Festival Fact: The town’s annual Superman Celebration reached its 45th edition in June 2023, and organizers used the weekend to rededicate this statue, then 30 years old.

📷 Photo: Antony-22 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

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💪 Popeye Statue — Crystal City, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

Popeye stands in South Texas because of what grows around it. Crystal City calls itself the Spinach Capital of the World, and its spinach growers first put up a Popeye statue in 1937.

📷 Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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🪨 Maryhill Stonehenge — Maryhill, Washington, USA 🇺🇸

A concrete Stonehenge above the Columbia River is a war memorial. Road builder Sam Hill dedicated it in 1918 to the soldiers of Klickitat County who died in World War I, and it was completed in 1929.

💡 History Fact: Hill, a Quaker and pacifist, toured the real Stonehenge in 1915 with Lord Kitchener, who told him the ancients had offered bloody sacrifices there to their gods of war. Hill built the replica to show modern war as the same kind of needless sacrifice.

📷 Photo: Shiinbbi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)