TOMMY LEE PARK
If indeed we end up reconfiguring three downtown parks because of their unfortunate connections to a racist past, let’s go ahead and do a clean sweep. A lot of people used to complain about the tall, phallic-shaped obelisk in Tom Lee Park, or at least the vintage inscription on it, “To a Worthy Negro.” (That was how, once upon a time, a hero like the African-American Tom Lee, who saved several people from drowning, could be referred to.) Solution: keep the obelisk (which is due to be replaced by a more fitting memorial for Lee) and reassign it – and one end of the riverside park – to a near namesake, Tommy Lee, the Motley Crue drummer whose group has favored our city with its playing, even recently, and who is perhaps best known for the sex video with then wife Pamela Anderson that exposed his his heroic, er, dimensions. Proposed new inscription: To a Very Worthy White Boy.