Granger Dinosaurs

Granger Dinosaurs

To improve the public image of Granger, Wash. in the early 90’s, the public works department decided to build life size cement dinosaurs to be displayed throughout the city. The city is now up to 32 dinosaurs and currently make a new one every year.

Full Transcript

[Bruce] The baby brontosaurus, that is number one. This is what the city crew made to start with. We’re talking ’94. He’s the one that caused the excitement about doing all of the dinosaurs and stuff. It all started with community revitalization. And one of the things was community image. The Granger Public Works guys, they came up with an idea and they created a little baby brontosaurus. It generated a lot more enthusiasm than I think even they were expecting. And so the idea was to create more of these dinosaurs.

[Jodie] When we first started it was pretty experimental. On the earlier ones we didn’t really have much metal or rebar or anything in ’em to strengthen ’em. Now we wrap ’em with a chicken wire and it’s more like a stucco finish. The biggest thing that we do is we make sure they’re gonna be safe. That they ain’t gonna collapse and fall on somebody or something. As you can tell by the construction behind, the way we test it, we climb on it, on the structure right now the way it sets, and jump on it, make sure there’s no weak points. Most of ’em we use a toy and I can copy a toy pretty accurately. Because if I got a three dimensional model to follow it’s real easy. I just convert the size up to the life size. Like this one behind me and about six others I’ve done off of pictures.

[Bruce] As you drive all the way through the community and then come out at the freeway interchange there, we have several dinosaurs that are all stationed all along that route. And a few others here and there. But that gives us the dino drive designation.

 [Jodie] It’s really give us an identity. And it’s a positive identity too. I wish this is all I had to do. I could make a bunch of ’em. But it’s hard enough just to find the time to do one a year. But on the same token it’s good that we’re doing one a year because it’s keeping what we’ve started alive.

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