What 42 massive and decaying presidential heads say about America - WaPo
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“The Presidents Heads,” a private collection of every ex-POTUS’s sculpted likeness from Washington to George W. Bush. They’re arranged in haphazard rows, with Andrew Jackson occupying a prime front spot simply because the owner likes his hair. The vibe is Stonehenge-meets-“The Walking Dead.”
Before they started sinking into the ground, the busts fashioned from concrete, plaster and rebar — was that Styrofoam poking through some cranial holes? — stood about twice the height of a basketball hoop. They each weighed at least five tons. Time has not been kind. Chester A. Arthur’s entire jaw is missing. Ulysses S. Grant has lost a chunk of his right eyebrow. And Franklin D. Roosevelt was “scalped” in transit, the tour guide noted, by a Route 199 overpass.
These commanders in chief weren’t supposed to spoil. They were carved with patriotic love by a Texas sculptor who studied in Paris under a French modern master. They were the polished centerpieces of a $10 million park that in 2010 went bankrupt after six years. Not enough admirers wanted to see them back when they were pristine.
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The late sculptor, David Adickes, was an Army veteran who’d wanted his stony visages to gleam. On an early-aughts trip to Mount Rushmore, he’d contemplated the granite mugs of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln and thought: Why stop at four? Adickes, who died last year at 98, hoped the 42 statues he chiseled at his Houston studio would land in the nation’s capital, he said on a 2022 podcast, but real estate was too costly. So in 2004, he and a business partner settled on a plot near Colonial Williamsburg, aiming to draw history buffs and stroller-pushing families. The Great Recession, overpriced tickets and poor marketing dashed that vision.
After the busts went bust, a rental car company purchased Presidents Park and hired local builder Howard Hankins to help flatten it into a parking lot. “I just couldn’t see crushin’ ’em,” Hankins recalled. Instead, he loaded the abandoned dignitaries onto a fleet of flatbed trucks and escorted them (minus their pedestals) to his farm-slash-industrial dump. Storing them in a muddy field was meant to be temporary, he insisted. A presidential fanatic, Hankins envisioned building a new museum. But the 11-mile move alone cost him $50,000, he said. A decade and a half later, the idea exists only on drawings.
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Fat Hitler would approve, provided they were all statues of him.