Originally published at: After 30-year-dispute, San Jose to remove statue in victory for Native American and Mexican communities | Boing Boing
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The mayor who spent $711,000 (1987) on the statue also forged a journal to try to establish myth as history.
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Where does the time go? I thought I had more time before facing the 2030’s, but apparently here they are. 
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The statue was commissioned in 1988 and completed in 1989. The controversy started immediately, which is why it wasn’t installed until 2002.
https://www.sanjoseca.gov/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/2741/1396?npage=5
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Christ, what an asshole.
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While the removal comes at a hefty $450,000 price tag
Wait - is it bronze? I bet a few meth addicts with angle grinders could remove it for you for free over night…
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Among a number of questions I asked McEnery when I called him back was the one that had been gnawing at me for years: Had he uncovered any evidence that Baptiste Exervier abused his Shoshone wife?
No, he replied. That was just literary license. In what sounded like a rueful voice, McEnery said he never imagined he would be speaking to a descendant of Exervier.
Awkward!
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Ooof, this thing. Our former amateur historian, privileged white guy mayor decided to “honor” this guy, basing it on a rosy fantasy of California history. My father, who was an actual California historian, told him outright, “No, don’t do it, it’s a terrible idea, the actual history isn’t pretty and honoring this guy is a slap in the face of the citizens of this (majority non-white) city.” The mayor did it anyways, and outside normal processes no less. The immediate backlash meant it’s been hidden from public view for its whole life - first in a warehouse, then in a marginal public space (essentially a traffic island behind a big fence), and now that the space it was in got turned into a proper park, it finally got removed for good (and to be permanently warehoused, because absolutely no one wants the damned thing).
The whole thing is both embarrassing but also highly symbolic of the typical (dys)functioning of local politics…
That’s probably what it’ll come down to - they actually wanted to melt it down, but the artist who made it won’t allow it, and no one wants it (the local history park, that gets all the stuff that’s inconveniently located, rejected it because they expected it to be vandalized constantly). The city will be paying perpetual storage fees until someone steals it.
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Not a Fallon fan, but I do enjoy having a grizzly bear on the flag.
Maybe just replace the statue of Fallon with a giant bear mauling some Spanish missionaries or something, that way you get a statue that has a little something for everyone.
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That’s the thing about these guys… they make stuff disappear at night. They hit 2 or 3 washing machines at my apt complex trying to get into the quarter bin, making HUGE gashes into the metal, but I guess they were engineered well enough that they didn’t actually get in.
But if it were being cut up for scrap…
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Then give it to him.
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Pretty sure he doesn’t want to pay the storage fees either, though sunk-cost fallacy might have kept that option off the table. The city seems to want to either get some use out of it or some money back - but neither of those are going to occur even in the far future, so they’ll just be spending money to store it until something* happens to it.
*Not necessarily theft, it might be arson - the city has (historical) form for it…
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Not a uniquely American thing.
In my town there is a statue of a man who stole the head of a First Nation’s person, replaced it with the head of another, and lied about it until found out. The statue was funded by his friends and family.
People now think that this statue is not such a good idea and should be removed, but there are people who actually think he did no wrong, and the statue should stay because “history”.
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