This park on Route 66 in the heart of downtown Winslow, Arizona, contains a brilliant bit of publicly funded art that is an intentional tourist draw, via a tribute to a song called “Take It Easy” — or more to the point, it’s a tribute to the fact that at one point the name of the town is mentioned in that song. Because what does a small town that is essentially dying do when it’s been mentioned in a hit song? Memorialize it in a way that draws tourism off of the highway into the town! (Essentially, therefore, this sort of falls into my “big things” category) But really, there’s something kind of fun and silly about this bit of public art, that people just love.
But the town was already were memorialized in “Get you’re kick’s on Route 66” you say… shouldn’t that be enough?
[That said, I’m from a suburb of Chicago called Winnetka and there’s a song called “Big Noise from Winnetka” which was a HUGE hit in the 1930’s and 40’s and is still played regularly by marching bands and jazz groups, which my affluent upper-crust town pretty much ignored like the plague … but hey]
IF you can’t just by looking at the picture above identify the song in question, it is called”Take It Easy” and was written by Jackson Browne&Glenn Frey, and performed by the Eagles (note the eagle in the mural that’s sitting on the window sill)
One of the interesting things was that all the shops directly adjacent to the park were promoting fund raising actives to pay for the parks restoration and upkeep
Kiddy corner from the wall — which as this picture shows was built SOLEY to put the mural on — is this, along side a store called the “Standing on the corner” gifts shop
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 