(2019) National Travel and Tourism Week: While I do advocate for a strong local cultural plan for DC, there's something attractive about distributing busts of former presidents around the city?

Forty-three presidential busts are remnants of bankrupted Presidents Park. (Photos: Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, the Express free daily ran a photo showing busts of former Presidents ("All the presidents busts--in pictures," Guardian), which had been featured in an amusement park in Virginia, and were acquired when the park went bust ("Why the giant heads of 43 presidents are sitting in a field in Virginia," MNN).  From the article:

The presidential heads once were on display at Presidents Park in York County, near Williamsburg. The 10-acre park featured a museum and a sculpture garden where visitors could stroll among the presidential busts while reading about each man's accomplishments.

The park was open from 2004 to 2010, according to "All the Presidents' Heads," a documentary about the giant creations. When the park closed, the heads sat abandoned for several years until new developers bought the property. They were putting in a rental car business and asked Howard Hankins, who owned a local waste management company, to haul the statues away and destroy them.

"Instead of going into the crusher, I brought them up to the farm and there they are in their new home," Hankins says in the documentary, which you can watch [here].

While I argue vociferously for the execution of a locally focused culture plan, the fact is that most visitors to Washington visit because of the national story.

I've never been a fan of the fiberglass cows and such that some cities, including Washington in the past, have used to attract people to out of the way corners of a community, mostly because the figures usually have no local connections or are particularly hokey.

Although one iteration of the program in DC was of elephants and donkeys, representing the Republican and Democratic political parties ("Asses for the Masses," Washington City Paper).

-- Public Art | Fiberglass Animals for Community Art Projects | Cowpainters

Each of the stock figures is then painted in a design by a local artist, and at the end of the project, they are usually auctioned off to raise money for the sponsoring organization.

I suppose that would be the same of heads of former US Presidents. But what better city to have them placed?  (Although they are heavy, fiberglass would have been better.)

Ironically, decades ago when I worked for a health organization, they did a poorly designed survey asking elementary school aged kids to name past Presidents as well as brands of beer, and they could name more brands of beer.

 My response was "well, their families ought to be spending on multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to keep their names in the public eye."

Displaying these sculptures around DC would be a way to keep those names in the public eye, and promote a kind of new approach to public sculpture programs in the city (of which the annual Georgetown Glow is an example), and work to make better connections between the national and local stories.

Just this past weekend, in the Sunday Post Travel section, they ran a story, "Home of giants? You'll find it in rural Wisconsin," about visiting the FAST manufacturing site, in Sparta, Wisconsin.