i dont know what i was expecting

last year when i posted this people melted down and went out of their way to misinterpret the purpose of this exercise and just say insane racist shit; the goal is to get you to reflect on whether or not you engage with black music and black art and artists, and if you seem to avoid doing so, to ask yourself why that is

The quintessential Big Dumb Thing is the St. Louis Arch, which was built to commemorate westward expansion and is almost exclusively there for tourists, but also gives an otherwise kind of mid city a little bit of identity. I have to imagine that as soon as it was built, people started talking about it, which is one of the things I like. When practical considerations dominate how cities are built, it's great to have someone's creative vision writ large on the horizon, even if it's not the most beautiful thing ever constructed.

To qualify as a Big Dumb Thing, the structure in question needs to have no practical purpose for being built how it was, or at least minimal purpose. Most of its shape should be aesthetic, though as buildings involve engineering, I'm willing to give a lot of leeway. Most often, they'll be towers, because those stick out, and you get more bang for your buck with a tower.

Not all landmarks are Big Dumb Things. There are plenty of bridges and buildings that are pretty but functional, and the functionality comes first, because they were built with that function in mind. So the Golden Gate Bridge? Not, in my parlance, a Big Dumb Thing, even if it's nice to go up and look at, and dominates the popular understanding of San Francisco's identity.

But San Francisco also has Coit Tower, which was built because someone wanted it to exist and had the money to make that happen. This very much gets at the heart of why most Big Dumb Things are built, and if not for the Golden Gate Bridge, I think it would have found a more prominent place in the city's cultural identity.

I would like to hear about your local Big Dumb Thing. Something that someone built mostly because they thought that it would be cool to have around, either built by a benefactor or commissioned or just a building made into art. Might be a monument, might be a tower, might be a building, it just needs to be Big and also Dumb (affectionate).

Originally built to advertise a pest control company, its prominent placement along the I-95 that everyone going in and out of the city had to drive down meant that everyone knew about the Big Blue Bug- and it being considerably more noticeable than the nearby yellow billboard meant a lot of people had no idea why there was a giant fiberglass termite towering over the interstate like a low-budget B-movie monster.