Superman Statue
Metropolis, Illinois
In 1973 comic book artist Neal Adams was commissioned to illustrate ideas for a proposed "Amazing World of Superman" theme park. It would cost $50 million to build in Metropolis, Illinois, the official Hometown of Superman (as proclaimed by both DC Comics and the Illinois House of Representatives). Visitors would enter the park between the straddled legs of a 200-foot-tall statue of the Man of Steel.
It never happened.
Thirteen years later Metropolis, humbled, scraped together a thousand bucks and put up a cheesy seven-foot-tall fiberglass Superman in the town square, unveiled on November 7, 1986. No one liked it much, not even in Superman's hometown. Vandals mocked the Man of Steel with bullet holes.
The perforated Superman eventually disappeared, and was replaced on June 5, 1993, by a 15-foot-tall, three-ton Superman statue, funded with engraved bricks purchased by Metropolis citizens for 35 bucks apiece. The statue cost $120,000 (which works out to more than 3,400 people buying bricks in a town of 6,700). The statue was made by the same company that built the giant Emmy outside the Television Hall of Fame in Hollywood. On the day of the statue's unveiling a storm knocked out all the power in Metropolis, so it was perhaps for the best that President Clinton, invited to the ceremony, couldn't attend.
The not-quite Man of Steel is now made of projectile-proof bronze, and has thus far successfully defeated most incoming speeding bullets.
In November 2020 Superman was given a new coat of paint, which is expected to last until at least 2040. A small "Lucky Spot" was left unpainted on his left boot, so that visitors could rub it for luck.