Cincinnati has pigs, and they are adorable. I’m a regular at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, where they occasionally add extra props to their ‘Ham-let’ to suit the occasion.
Lexington had horses, pretty neat. (I really liked Vegetariat.)
St. Louis, in all of our originality, had people.
Chicago went on to do furniture; we had couches and chairs scattered all over the Loop (and even as far out as Niles: we had a couch out in front of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Fountain with Abe Lincoln sitting on it).
I lived in Indy for many years, and I would contest that the city is “obsessed” with racecars. A small segment of the city is obsessed with them, yes. The rest of us tried to ignore them as much as possible.
Try ignoring them when you live on the west side!! (Only through high school, thank Og.)
Avarie537, I did in fact live on the west side for a couple of years. That was horrible; you couldn’t go anywhere on race day and it was hard to get out at all during quals.
But for most of my tenure in Indianapolis I lived on the east side (near what used to be the Naval Avionics Center) or north side (about a mile east of Glendale Mall). So we managed to ignore the track pretty well.
We have the same thing here.
The city stores these big heavy statues over the winter and drags them out again in the spring.
They don’t serve any purpose I can see besides taking up valuable space on the sidewalks. They’re not even that interesting.
Whitefish, Montana (a couple hours north of here) has grizzlies. My favorite was the one whose back was painted like the night sky full of stars. I think the idea is totally cool. But yeah, doing race cars is pretty stupid.
Thanks for the link Munch. I’ll have to go downtown and take a look. To be honest, I thought the cow idea in Chicago was kind of loopy. Were they celebrating their meat packing heritage or what? The racecars at least make some sort of weird sense.
Hmmm. Maybe cornstalks could be next?
Here in Rhode Island (home of Hasbro, Inc.) we had the Mr. Potato Heads all over the state.
My favorite is “The Independant Potato”. Hee!
Rasa, that sounds like fun!
Yeah, and that one outside Navy Bistro scares the shit out of me. It wants me dead! ::shudder::
Milwaukee had Beasties last summer.
I liked Cincinnati’s pigs. They even named one after me! 
I haven’t been downtown to see the cars yet, as this sounds like an incredibly STOOPID thing . . . more like a crappy craft project. I hope the Arts Council didn’t pay good money for this . . . I can think of more deserving projects.
I live on the east side and the race doesn’t effect me at all. Except the tourists that come and attempt to drive the wrong way down the one way streets – two mini-heart attacks per week in May.
I think the smoking ban is dumb – leave it up to the individual owners and stop shoving stupid rules down everyone’s throat! I just quit smoking, so it won’t effect me at all.