What’s up with those dilapidated Hugo the Hornet statues on the side of the road?
I have seen many dead beetles in my life. These are different:
Your eyes are not deceiving you. That’s a very large Hugo the Hornet just laying on his side, without his right hand, which is gloved like a cartoon. He appears to be near a freeway. And there’s more than one. There’s a blue leg sitting in front of a dumpster. This is the stuff of nightmares if you’re a young, impressionable Charlotte Hornets fan. The hive was aliveyou would say, sitting up straight in your bed. But Hugo was DEAD!
I saw the tweet and thought that this might be a topic for the rabbit hole. Once againHowever, I was told that I had no choice:
I have solved others Hugo-related secrets in the past. How difficult can it be?
First, let’s look at the context. I recognized the red brick walls from my years in Charlotte. Originally, I thought it might be along Interstate 77 north of Uptown, but an observant follower said it’s actually along Independence Boulevard where it meets Albemarle Road. Says Hank Lee: “I can’t think of any other place where there is a two-lane road with an on-ramp in the middle of a highway.”
Next, I contacted the guy who posted the pictures, a guy who does traffic reports for radio stations and comes by @clt_TrafficGuy on Twitter. It turns out the image came from one of the many traffic cameras placed along the highways. Here’s a wider view from one of them, clearly showing the Albemarle Road intersection:
You can also see the second Hugo, along with a dumpster and lots of trash nearby.
After that, I contacted a former Hornets employee who didn’t remember the big Hornets being on display anywhere in the arena for the past two years and thought it might be discarded stuff from a warehouse. He recommended I speak to Evan Kent.
Evan and I go back. I spoke to him about 12 years ago when I Working on a Charlotte Magazine history about a grassroots initiative to change the name of the Charlotte Bobcats to the Hornets. When I first started covering it, it was a whimsical story. It ended up being a real possibility and a few years later, thanks to the tireless urging of Evan and a number of others, it became a reality. He literally (wait for it) brought back the enthusiasm.
If anyone would know, it would be Evan, who turned all that energy into The Crown Club. “I’m pretty sure it’s just some leftover pieces of a billboard,” he wrote to me. “I think Novant Health.”
He was right. A little research on the Internet revealed a photo gallery of a large 3D Hugo that will be placed on a Novant Health billboard just off I-277 near the AvidXchange Music Factory. There is also a video:
Hugo is 19 feet tall! THAT’S A BIG OLD BUG.
The video is from November 2014, but the real Hugo was not hoisted into place until October 16th. according to WSOC-TVthat flew a helicopter over it. Another hornet flew on a second Novant billboard along I-277. All this happened just months after the official name change was announced with a video of Hugo waving a Buzz City flag at the arena.
It’s hard to say exactly where the second poster was, as neither of them appear on Google Street View. Images from that area were taken in May 2014 and again in July 2015, and Hugo is nowhere to be found.
So I went to the Mecklenburg County Time Machinewhich includes aerial photographs of the Charlotte area dating back to 1938. A satellite image taken on March 29, 2015 shows the top of Hugo’s head in front of the billboard, but a few months later it’s gone. The 19-foot-tall Hugos didn’t even last a full year in their respective seats.
So where did they go? And where were they all this time?
Well, um, they were in the same place. Behind a wall on Independence Boulevard near Albemarle Road.
The same satellite imagery website that showed Hugo along I-277 on March 29, 2015, also showed the two Beetles in a small junkyard in October of that year. It’s the same junkyard where they sit today.
So if these things have been there for about nine years, how come no one has noticed them until now?
Well, some people have noticed. “There’s another Hugo lying around in another dump that people have been taking pictures of and sending us for years,” Evan Kent wrote to me. “It’s become a tradition, I think.” My educated guess: They’re the same Hugos in the same dump, but just seen from the ground. This property is owned by Adams Outdoor, which owns a lot of billboards in Charlotte. There used to be some commercial buildings here that were torn down about 20 years ago when Independence was expanded into a freeway. It’s been a graveyard for old marketing campaigns for at least 10 years now, and you can see other pieces of billboards scattered around. At least in the aerial photos. What’s there is up on a hill above Pierson Drive and is barely visible from the road. Every so often, though, someone would walk up to the chain-link gate, take a photo of a big dead Hugo, and send it to Evan.
So if that’s the case, why are we talking about it now? Because the traffic camera showing it is fairly new. “I just started looking around yesterday,” @Clt_TrafficGuy told me. “I saw some trash down there but never looked.”
So, to sum up: Ten years ago, an advertising agency commissioned two 22-foot-tall Hugo the Hornets to be placed on billboards near Uptown Charlotte. These insects were there for less than a year before they were taken down and unceremoniously dumped in a billboard scrap yard on the city’s east side. There they remained for nine years before anyone other than curious urban explorers noticed them. Part of me thinks this is somehow existential: We will all, like Hugo, be dead longer than we were alive. Another part just keeps repeating the same old NBC slogan: “If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s new to you!”
I contacted the advertising agency and Adams because I still have some questions. Namely: Why are these things still just standing there and rotting? Why don’t they auction them off, like a giant foam sphinx or maybe a pair of fiberglass Chick-fil-A cows currently selling on eBay for $2,700? Can’t you do anything else with it? Evan Kent thinks so. “Crown Club would love our tailgate spot! We’re putting it right out front on 5th Street,” he said, adding, “I’m not kidding, lol.” I know Evan. I know.
