Paul Bunyan Statue

The Paul Bunyan Statue, a twenty-foot-tall plastic monument erected in front of Derry's City Center in 1956, is a garish landmark of the town's civic pride and a site of childhood terror. For Richie Tozier, the statue becomes a vessel for the malevolent entity It, which animates the plastic giant in a terrifying hallucination that prefigures the summer's horrors and marks the beginning of Richie's personal confrontation with the creature.

Origin and Civic Controversy

The statue was commissioned by the Derry City Council in 1956, a year after City Center was built for a minor-league basketball team that never materialized. It was hotly debated in public meetings and the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Derry News. Many residents thought it would be a tourist attraction; others found the plastic Paul Bunyan “horrible, garish, and unbelievably gauche.” The art teacher at Derry High School wrote a letter threatening to blow it up. The controversy raged for six months, but the statue had already been purchased. It was unveiled on May 13, 1957, Derry's one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, shrouded in canvas until the ceremony. Paul stood in bib overalls and a red-and-white-checked shirt, a plastic axe slung over one shoulder, grinning at the northern skies. The cost of adding a blue ox was prohibitive, so Babe was not present. Children were delighted, climbing over Paul's huge black plastic boots while parents took photos.

Richie Tozier's Hallucination

In March of 1958, Richie Tozier, exhausted after eluding Henry Bowers and his friends in Freese's Department Store, sat on a bench near the statue. He dozed, and in a dream—or something worse—the statue came to life. Paul Bunyan's face loomed over him, its forehead low and beetling, its nose red, its eyes bloodshot. It leaned on its axe, which had crushed a trench in the concrete sidewalk. From between its gigantic yellow teeth came a smell like small animals rotting in hot underbrush. The giant spoke in a low rumbling voice: “I'm going to eat you up. Unless you give me back my hen and my harp and my bags of gold, I'm going to eat you right the fuck up!” Its breath made Richie's shirt flutter. The axe rose, and Richie rolled off the bench onto the gravel just as the blade sheared the bench in two. He scrambled to his feet, ran, and felt the earth shake as the axe buried itself haft-deep in the sidewalk inches behind his feet. When he finally looked back, the statue was on its pedestal, the bench was whole, and there was no footprint or axe-slash in the concrete. Richie dismissed it as a dream, but the terror lingered.

The Statue's Return in 1985

Twenty-seven years later, when Richie returns to Derry after Mike Hanlon's call, he finds himself drawn back to the same spot. The marquee on City Center now advertises a heavy-metal concert, but as Richie looks at it, the letters rearrange themselves into a grotesque welcome: “RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES,” followed by a lineup of dead rock stars—Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison—with the tagline “WELCOME HOME RICHIE! YOU'RE DEAD TOO!” The statue itself transforms: Paul Bunyan is gone, replaced by a twenty-foot-tall Day-Glo clown with orange pompom buttons and a huge bunch of plastic balloons. The clown speaks to Richie, taunting him, and Richie's eyes are struck by a searing pain that forces him to remove his contact lenses. The statue then becomes a twenty-foot-tall plastic Buddy Holly wearing a button that reads “RICHIE TOZIER'S 'ALL-DEAD' ROCK SHOW,” one bow of his glasses mended with adhesive tape. Richie flees, and the pain in his eyes—a physical manifestation of the entity's presence—continues to plague him.

Destruction and Aftermath

During the apocalyptic storm that marks the final confrontation with It, the Paul Bunyan Statue is destroyed. At 10:02 A.M. on May 31, 1985, as downtown Derry collapses into the Canal, the statue explodes. Its bearded grinning head rises straight up into the air; one leg kicks forward, the other back, as if Paul had attempted a split so enthusiastic it resulted in dismemberment. The midsection blows out in a cloud of shrapnel, and the head of the plastic axe rises into the rainy sky, twirling end over end, before shearing through the roof and floor of the Kissing Bridge. The statue is never rebuilt, and its ruins join the rubble of the devastated town center.

Narrative Significance

The Paul Bunyan Statue serves as a barometer of Derry's civic identity and its underlying corruption. Its controversial origins reflect the town's uneasy relationship with its own history and its susceptibility to the grotesque. For Richie, the statue is a personal locus of terror, a place where the boundary between the mundane and the supernatural collapses. Its destruction during the storm marks the end of the cycle of violence and the beginning of Derry's physical and spiritual dissolution.