A 26-foot statue of a Native American chief that had been a San Antonio landmark since the 1960s was felled by Hyundai’s dealership standards.
The statue came down in July as part of a reconstruction project at Red McCombs Superior Hyundai.
“This is a piece of history that is really unique but is not part of the Hyundai experience,” Peter Brodnitz, McCombs Enterprises’ vice president of marketing, told the San Antonio Express-News.
The statue originally was erected at a Pontiac dealership near downtown San Antonio that advertised itself as “Home of the Big Chief.” The store and its fiberglass mascot moved to a site overlooking the city’s Interstate 410 freeway loop in 1977.
McCombs inherited the statue when it bought the dealership in 1989. Its removal happened five months after company founder Red McCombs died at age 95.
Brodnitz told the Express-News that the group was seeking a new home for the statue, which the store dressed in a massive San Antonio Spurs jersey when the team made the NBA playoffs.
“It is the end of an era,” he said. “We’re bummed about it.”
The statue was criticized by some as culturally insensitive, though Ramon Vasquez, executive director of American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions in San Antonio, told the Express-News in 2019 that he had “no bad blood” with the McCombs family over it.