Thread by @Reach4ACopsGun

Every Public Lenin Statue in America (thread 🧵)

I'll start with the most controversial and infamous one, The Statue of Lenin in Seattle. This statue got a lot of press last summer when statues of former slave owners were being torn down across the country in protests a lot of alt-right media ran stories about the Seattle Lenin

Made by Bulgarian sculptor Emil Venkov in 1981 as a commission for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Venkov intended to portray Lenin as a fierce bringer of revolution, in contrast to the traditional portrayals of Lenin as a philosopher and educator.

Venkov's work was completed and installed in Poprad, Czechoslovak in 1988, one year before the fall of Czechoslovak communism during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The statue was sold to a scrapyard and was destined to be cut up and sold for the price of the bronze.

Enter Lewis "Lew" Carpenter, the hero of this story.

Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad, originally from Texas, found the hollow monumental statue lying in a scrapyard with a homeless man living inside it. Carpenter who had met and befriended the sculptor Venkov, wanted to preserve it for its historic and artistic merit.

He approached Poprad city officials, saying that despite its current unpopularity, the statue was still a work of art worth preserving, and offered to buy it for $12,000, signed a contract with the Mayor of Poprad in 1993, and after a vote by the City Council, the statue was his.

Carpenter mortgaging his home in order to finance the sale and shipment of the statue back to the United States, it had to be cut into three pieces and reassembled. Overall the sale and cost of shipment of the statue cost the equivalent of around $110,000 in today's money.

The statue arrived to Carpenter's family home in Issaquah, Washington in August 1993.

Lewis E. Carpenter died in a car accident in February 1994.

Carpenter was a real adventurer in the true sense of the word. He had a broad background from saddle-making in Seatlle to Army intelligence in Vietnam but as the relatively mundane role of an English teacher in post-revolutionary Slovakia he'd find his 16 ft legacy in the dump.

Lewis "Lew" Carpenter (left) with his friend Emil Venkov (right), the sculptor Statue of Lenin (1981).

Slovakian obituary + English translation by Carpenter's friend and journalist Tomáš Fülöpp, a lot of the great photos from this thread come from his personal website.

Emil Venkov (left), Carpenter (right)

Before Carpenter's death, he planned to install it in front of a Slovak restaurant in Issaquah, his crash happened during public debates on whether to display the statue in Issaquah that ended in rejection from the suburb's residents.

After Carpenter's death, his family planned to sell the statue to a Fremont foundry to be melted down and repurposed. Once again the 16 ft statue was doomed to be melted down for copper, even after all of Carpenter's effort and money to preserve his friend's art.

The foundry's founder Peter Bevis, a sculptor himself saw the artistic mastery in the sculpture and instead paid himself for the statue to be put back together a sought instead to display the statue in Fremont. Another hero of this story.

Interesting aside, the MV Kalakala was a ferry notable for her art deco design and popularity at the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair, voted second only to the Space Needle. She was beached in Alaska and found by Bevis who tried to raise funds for the restoration for the rest of his life

Bevis agreed to have the Fremont Chamber of Commerce hold the statue in trust until a buyer was found. The statue was unveiled in June 1995, at the corner of Evanston Avenue and North 34th Street on private property, near another artistic Fremont attraction, the Fremont Rocket.

The owners moved the statue two blocks north to the intersection of Fremont Place North & North 36th Street on a property with commercial retail spaces occupied by a Taco del Mar and a gelato shop at the time. The new location is three blocks west of the Fremont Troll.

It quickly became beloved by the local Seattle community and became a landmark destination. This was in the same place, at the same time as the Seattle WTO protests. Seattle had a history of being a 'radical' city, Seattle 1919 General Strike, Seattle Liberation Front, CHOP/CHAZ.

Locals have dress Lenin up every holiday season since 2004.

Judeo–Bolshevism

Every Public Lenin Statue in America (thread Thread)

The Lenin statue dressed in drag for a Gay Pride festival in 2005.

The statue's hands are often painted (and repainted) red to protest what critics perceive as the glorification of what they see as a historical villain who has blood on his hands. 🙄 idc

Alt-right media have held up the example of the Fremont Lenin statue to protest the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in the US. In the wake of the Unite the Right rally, Jack Posobiec led a gathering of several protesters at the statue to demand its removal.

The same day, Mayor Ed Murray called for the removal of a Seattle Confederate monument but also gave a speech that the Lenin statue should be removed as well, but acknowledged that since it is on private property, the city government has no power to remove the statue.

A bill introduced to the state legislature in early 2019 by a group of Republican representatives called for the statue's removal and replacement, in response to a bill reconsidering a statue of Marcus Whitman at the Washington State Capitol.

If you're in Seattle and want to visit the Fremont Lenin you can today! It's on the corner of Fremont Pl N and N 36 St next to the vape shop. Since day one this 7-ton, 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture has been always at threat of being taken down or melted so see him while you can.

Street View angles which i think better show how this statue towers over you in person.

The second public U.S. Lenin statue i want to discuss is the New York 'Red Square' Lenin. This particular likeness of Lenin was created by Yuri Gerasimov, who was commissioned to build it by the Soviet Union, but because of the Union’s collapse, the statue was never unveiled.

The Red Square is the ironic name given to one of the first large-scale luxury private developments in the East Village. Construction was completed in 1989, the same year as the collapse of the USSR, so Michael Rosen, the developer, and owner of the building named it accordingly.

A few years later, a friend of one of Red Square’s original owners stumbled across the statue in the backyard of a rural Russian estate. Michael Rosen bought the statue, had it transported to the United States, and installed it on top of Red Square.

“I wanted to do an homage to the history of the Lower East Side, which had been a hotbed of political thought,” Rosen, a former professor of radical sociology at NYU, said, adding that the statue originally had been positioned to appear as if Lenin was waving toward Wall Street.

In 2016 the statue suddenly and without warning disappeared from view, with it came rumors that the Red Square has been sold to a new developer; many local residents were distressed as they felt the 18-foot-tall statue gave their neighbor character and a landmark.

In 2017 The New York Lenin found a new home, just a couple of blocks away to the top of 178 Norfolk St after getting permission from the building owner Michael Shaoul. It now overlooks a playground and you can visit it today.

When the statue was erected on the rooftop of 250 East Houston Street he was positioned to wave at the Twin Towers & was a playful jab at capitalism.
"We never thought he would outlast them."

Imagine how crazy it would be if someone was on the roof that day,9/11, and took a picture from this angle of the Twin Towers up in smoke.

Russian Television piece on the New York Lenin from 2009.

The third public American Lenin Statue to get through is the Headless Lenin statue that was outside of the Red Square Restaurant and Bar in Las Vegas. Which opened inside the Mandalay Bay Resort 👁 in 1999. (happy 4 year anniversary to that op)

The Red Square restaurant prided itself with being the only depiction of Soviet culture in the United States. After numerous complaints about the ironic Las Vegas location of a Lenin statue, resort management cut the head off the statue and displayed it inside the bar.

The bar closed in 2019 and overnight the Lenin statue disappeared, I can't find any information on what happened to it. My best guess is somewhere in Nevada there is a 14-foot-tall headless Lenin laying buried in a dump, and somewhere else, possibly in the same dump, is his head.

The fourth Lenin statue i want to share with you all is a unique sculpture called "Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head" by the Gao Brothers.

This 20-foot-tall statue stood outside the Los Angeles Ace Museum near La Brea from 2012 to 2017 he Ace Museum was evicted from the property for non-payment of rent. The statue was then moved to the Mojave Desert where it sat for a while before being moved to Vancouver.

*smooch

The fifth American Lenin statue, and my favorite, is the Scrapyard Lenin of Willimantic, Connecticut.

There isn't a lot of pictures of this but the story is very interesting, Bernard and Nathan Schilberg ran a scrap metal business in Willimantic, they called it The Schilberg Integrated Metals Corporation, others might call it a junkyard.

In 1995 they began buying scrap from the remnant states of the former Soviet Union, a standard practice for lots of American scrap yards at the time, and this went business as usual, until they found a 12-foot brass statue buried in a shipment they acquired for 50 cents a pound.

Compare that to the $110,000 that Wes Chandler spent to get his 7-ton 16-foot Lenin home, the Schilberg's spent under $2,000 to acquire their 1-ton 12-foot Lenin Statue. I'd say the Schilbergs accidentally got the better deal. (adjusted for inflation in both cases)

The statue depicts Vladimir Lenin in a pose described as "casual" by The Associated Press and "imperious" by The Hartford Courant, one hand in his pocket and the other clutching his lapel. The Willimantic Lenin has a more relaxed vibe than a lot of other Lenin statues.

Lenin could rise again.

A tiny description on the back revealed that the sculpture was commissioned by the Russian Artistic Fund and was cast at the Mytishchi Factory of Artistic Castings, The Schilbergs believe it came from St Petersburg but were unable to locate where it stood on a trip.

Bent bolts at the base suggest a violent end in Russia, from Lenin's point of view, however, his story has a happy ending. Back at home, he would surely have been melted, but in Willimantic, Connecticut at The Schilberg Integrated Metals Corporation, he still stands 12 feet tall.

Video of two friends visiting The Willimantic Lenin in 2018 (edited for brevity) Old newspaper articles that interviewed The Schilbergs say that they were getting offers from all over the country to purchase the Lenin and they were considering selling it.

I'm glad they didn't, Lenin belongs in Willimantic.

Also in 1997 the Lenin was used as the head of the 'Boom-Box' parade in Willimantic but I can't find any pictures of this. You can read about it here from one of the local newspapers, you can also read about Wayne Norman's willingness to get a little bit crazy for the parade.

The Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas has two plaster Lenin's that were made for the museum's soviet wing. I don't really count these because they were made specifically for a museum but thought I'd include them in the thread for the sake of being thorough.

So there you have it! Seven Public Vladimir Lenin Statues in the United States. If you wanted to do a cross country Lenin road trip it would look like this.

Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of…
vacilando.org/article/story-…
creatorsvancouver.com/lenins-head-is…
ny.curbed.com/2016/9/26/1305…
vacilando.org/article/lewis-…
nytimes.com/2016/09/27/nyr…
evgrieve.com/2017/06/1st-lo…
seattle.curbed.com/2019/8/27/2083…
strangehistory.net/2014/01/09/the…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s…

best pictures from thread; image thread:
floating-lenin.jpg

Greetings-from-the-RED_SQUARE.jpeg

these guys...😌, the heroes of this story.

the construction worker pictures

end of the thread.