Why a Pig?
Vineyards were the
original industry in Cincinnati, Ohio. After a blight wiped
them out, swine herding became so big that
by the 1840s around the nation Cincinnati came to be called "Porkopolis."
If you were eating pork in America, it probably came from Cincinnati. The
rendered fat left over from packing all that pork made Cincinnati a good place
to make soap. To make soap you need fat and lye. There was an almost limitless
supply of fat here. And that was the beginning of Proctor & Gamble soap manufacturing.
That firm has a gross annual sales that is greater than the gross national
products of most of the countries in the world. And it is in Cincinnati because
200 years ago swine were herded here.
Most Cincinnatians had forgotten that history until 1988 when when a sculptor, Andrew Liecester from Minneapolis was commissioned to create a $300,000 gate for a new park. He did his research and saw how important this forgotten item of history was to what Cincinnati now is and, as a nod to that history, he put winged pigs on top of the gate. Half of the city thought it demeaning and wanted them removed. But the other half laughed. Now you cannot travel across the city without bumping into a winged pig. They are on teen shirts. There are items on menus names after them. If you run in the marathon in Cincinnati you are running in the Flying Pig Marathon. And so when ArtWorks decided to populate the city with fiberglass sculptures decorated by local artists, they chose pigs, named it The Big Pig Gig and a festival of 400 pig sculptures that blanketed the city of Cincinnati for a summer.
Liecester's original flying pigs, seen at right, are four 3-foot-high bronze pigs with wings. They appear to be shooting out of 30-foot-tall riverboat smokestacks. Cincinnati exists at all because it was a good place for riverboats to stop.
Click pic to enlarge
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