Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Popeye Character Trail

Today we visited the Popeye Festival Chester, Illinois which is the birthplace of Popeye.  They have a cute shop called Spinach Can Collectibles.  The town also features numerous statues of characters; Popeye is in bronze and the others in stone.  These are exceptional examples of municipal art; it's very difficult to render cartoon characters as good statues, but they are gorgeous.  The town also has a wonderful sense of history, with many of its old stone or brick buildings intact; along with several nice public spaces such as the gazebo park where Wimpy's statue stands flanked by murals on the neighboring buildings.  The parking lot for the courthouse also has a monument made of stone and brick from a historic hotel, a clever example of recycling older materials to keep a bit of the history.

It's like a little slice of Terramagne.  Over there, most towns have some kind of claim to fame and they'll do a festival for it. They show off local color, historic buildings, and the like.  Collecting is a very popular hobby -- as you can see from my character sheets -- so there are a lot of little oddball shops that specialize in different knicknacks.  The parks often have a statue or other feature for which they are named, and municipal art is very popular.  In several cases, people have made monuments from things smashed during a major cape fight or leftover bits of gizmology; Bluehill has some of these.
Tags: community, holiday, illinois, personal
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