Mayor Bud Clark rode his bike down to Union Station one August morning in 1985 to greet Portland’s new face. On the front page of the next day’s Oregonian, he stands in a boxcar alongside sculptor Raymond Kaskey, addressing an eager press corps as a giant copper face you may or may not recognize looks on. 

The giant lady was supposed to be so much more than the namesake of an IFC show. In the years he’d worked on Portlandia, after winning a public design contest, Kaskey took every chance to compare her to the Statue of Liberty, the face of America herself, as seen on every key chain, bottle opener, stamp, locket, coin, T-shirt, Christmas ornament, and novelty cast-iron pan imaginable. Not only was Portlandia made by the same grueling hammered-copper method, she was likewise a generically hopeful, mythic goddess. 

“New Journalism” forefather Tom Wolfe backed him up, writing about Portlandia for the 100-year anniversary of Lady Liberty in Newsweek. Both statues were public art the way public art ought to be, Wolfe wrote, great populist monuments to a vague promise of hope. 

The story is that a light rain fell on the October day she floated on a barge down the Willamette toward Gov. Tom McCall Waterfront Park. She was a crouching lady in a toga, her right arm reaching down to the people and her left shooting a trident 40 feet into the air. She weighed nine tons. Cars stopped on bridges to watch. Boats trailed. Mayor Clark took to a canoe, Wolfe reported. “As he closed in on the great copper goddess in midriver, he cried out, ‘Whoop-whoop!’ Then he cried again, for good measure, ‘Whoop-whoop!’” Wolfe was in the park, where “Tax-straddle arbitrageurs stood shank-to-flank with sod farmers.” The goddess united all. Thousands cheered as she rode on a flatbed truck from the water to the Portland Building, where she still crouches. Parents held children up to graze her hand.

So where’s my fridge magnet? Bag charm? License plate? How did this beacon of hope, this surefire icon, get lost so swiftly? She’s still right there! Perhaps it was an omen that a lawyer wrote the dedicatory poem (another public contest). Despite his triumph, Kaskey didn’t become a famous sculptor so much as a famously litigious copyright holder. Unlike replicating the Statue of Liberty, which is in the public domain, or Portland’s White Stag sign, for which the city holds a copyright, if you want to put Portlandia’s mug on a mug, you gotta pay Kaskey. “It’s called capitalism,” he told Willamette Week in 2013. At this point, you may also need to explain who this mysterious sea maiden is.