Why Philadelphia’s Rocky Statue Resonates with the World

metroweekly.com:

“The thing about monuments,” says Paul Farber, “is that there is no coherent set of monuments.”Farber knows. As one of the country’s foremost experts on the subject of America’s monuments, great and small, and the co-founder and director of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, he has a deeper, more complex worldview of the statues and structures that the rest of us sometimes take for granted.“It is a common misconception that there is some government agency out there in charge of all the monuments and they greenlight them and take the bad ones away,” says the youthful 40-year-old. “The truth is nothing like that.”It is the day before Super Bowl LVII, in which the Kansas City Chiefs are set to do battle with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Farber, a native Philadelphian, and longtime sports fan, has hopped on a Zoom call to not only discuss the meaning of our nation’s monuments in a fascinating deep dive, but to talk about the importance of one of Philadelphia’s most beloved structures: The statue of Rocky Balboa.Originally constructed as a prop for the 1982 film Rocky III, the statue — which Farber notes is a monument to “the most famous Philadelphian who never lived” — has an almost uncanny, magnetic draw.

It’s a touchstone for Philadelphians and tourists alike, drawing more annual visitors than the city’s fabled Liberty Bell.Farber recently launched a six-part NPR narrative podcast about the Rocky statue entitled, appropriately enough, “The Statue,” which will air its sixth and final episode this Tuesday, Feb.

14.“When you look at the story as we do in the podcast, you have a spotlight on Stallone, but actually, it’s the people around the story and around the statue,” he says.