Symbol of a City
For the people of Florence, Michelangelo’s statue of David has been their civic symbol since he finished it in 1504. It was placed in front of the town hall(above), the Palazzo Vecchio. It symbolized the Florentine Republic’s independence among larger city-states and it’s defense of civil liberties. The original was put in a Florentine museum gallery in 1873 and it was replaced by a replica. I took this picture of the replica in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in 2010.
Mankato West High School Humanities teacher Marty Wiltgen was explaining the significance of Michelangelo’s David as a piece of art and as a symbol to our class one day and posed a question: what was the symbol of Mankato? There was some discussion but I don’t recall his students coming to any sort of consensus.
Wiltgen then clicked the slide projector from David to the statue of Happy Chef. I thought this was the funniest thing I had ever seen in his class. But he was completely serious: the statue of Happy Chef was an enduring symbol of Mankato’s spirit of entrepreneurship. Happy Chef started in Mankato and expanded to a large chain of Upper Midwest restaurants. A fair number of the restaurants still remain. The one with the statue welcomes you into Mankato as you drive into town on Highway 169 South.
Recalling this memory made me wonder - what is the symbol of Minneapolis? The Stone Arch Bridge, Mary Tyler Moore statue, Hard Rock Cafe guitar?
