City of Presidents Walk

Rapid City SD – September 2021

Rapid City SD bills itself the “City of Presidents”, and there are statues of all the presidents (President Trump is not there yet) on different street corners in the middle of downtown. It’s a neat idea. So I took about an hour and a half to walk all over downtown and take pictures of all of them. Here are my favorites:

George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses Grant
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt close-up
William Taft. This one is cool. President Taft was a huge (literally!) baseball fan, and he was the first president to throw out the first pitch at a major league baseball game. In this statue, he is bent over ready to throw. There is a baseball behind his back in his right hand!
Calvin Coolidge
Franklin Roosevelt
Dwight Eisenhower
Ronald Reagan

Rushmore Plaza Civic Center

Mary Jean, her daughter Melissa and her friend Pat saw Elvis Presley in concert at this venue in June 1977, just a few weeks before he died.

Mary Jean and Pat revisited the place this week.
The entrance.
The arena. Mary Jean’s seats in 1977 were in the front orange seats on the right, near the fork truck.
Poster from the 1977 concert.