We begin at the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird is a hotel/motel in Bloomington, MN. It was built in 1962 near the airport and very near Metropolitan Stadium, the original home of the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings. Metropolitan Stadium is long gone and so is the Met, home of the North Stars which stood nearby. They have been replaced with the Mall of America and an IKEA. The Thunderbird is still there, but is now owned by Ramada.
The Thunderbird used to feature two twenty-some foot tall fiberglass indians. (Pictures below are courtesy of Mykl Roventine.)
These indians were removed in the spring of 2006 when the Thunderbird was being remodeled. Some reports indicated that these two were trashed; sometimes these things get moved to other locations. It would be a shame if they were trashed. Nobody wants their life to end in a dumpster in a motel parking lot. This picture on RoadsideAmerica.com indicates foul play. No oversized fiberglass indian would go anywhere without his moccasins.
3 comments:
Thanks for including these guys. I like the idea of remembering "the fallen." My wife and I are on a similar quest to capture big stuff and had long wanted to add these two to our collection. We focused on the far away items at first, obtained during vacations and visits to family. It was only on a whim, when had a few spare moments, that we took these shots of giants practically in our back yard. A short time later, they were gone.
I didn't find out about them until it was too late. I heard about the indians at the Thunderbird and went to try to find them, since I lived less than 10 blocks away, but I must have been a few months too late.
Thank you for sharing this. I was at this hotel when Welstone won in 1991? won. I was a senior in High School that year, go Wayzata. I was there again, after Marine boot camp 1993. This place rocks, I think it was my love of hockey that made it so special to me. Anyway, now 35 running the Health and Welfare programs for a fortune 100 employer in Atlanta, GA I can long for the simpler (colder) days as I sip my Scotch... Good night Chief wherever you are
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