Winds Howling

Since writing about the “Greetings from Sterling Heights” mural the city is putting on the side of its new pickleball building, I’ve been in touch with the artist painting it, Wendy Popko, and she pointed out a few things I got wrong in my analysis of the design. Here are some corrections and nuances.

The mural has big block letters spelling “Sterling Heights” filled with images of local landmarks and traditions. Here’s the design Popko submitted to the city:

In my original post, I went letter by letter, writing what I saw in each one. Some of them went over my head. I also overlooked two landmarks elsewhere in the design and wrongly stated that one of them was not there at all.

S: Not a dog, as I wrote, but the “Two Bears” sculpture outside the Sterling Heights Public Library. Here’s a photo from when it was installed in October 1981.

TE: Not simply a person playing guitar and hands making hearts and peace signs, as I wrote, but a representation of free concerts held at Sterlingfest and weekly during the summer at Dodge Park.

HT: I mostly got this right, that this was a representation of the city’s ethnic diversity, but Popko added that it also stems from the Cultural Exchange event the city holds every year in March.

S: This skateboarder isn’t just any skateboarder — he’s a stand-in for the skate park by the library. The bicyclist represents the city’s biking trails in general, Popko said.

I also wrote that the large circular sculpture with which Sterling Heights kicked off its identity-building phase, known locally as The Golden Butthole, was nowhere depicted on this celebration of local landmarks. I was, however, wrong. It’s in the bottom left corner, rising like the sun from behind a depiction of Upton House, another thing I missed. Upton House is the oldest house in the city, dating to 1866, and is now a museum situated just outside Dodge Park. In my original post, I smugly observed that all the landmarks I could identify were less than 10 years old, mostly artifacts of the mid-2010s redevelopment of Dodge Park. Now I concede I overlooked one that predates the formation of the city by 102 years.

I also made much of there being a certain hollowness in this attempt at self-mythology by Sterling Heights. The city specifically commissioned this “postcard-style mural” to commemorate itself on the north wall of a pickleball complex that it spent nearly $10 million on, using funds from a big city improvement millage it successfully campaigned for in 2024. As I’ve written, the city is also planning to demolish the mall that was once its signature institution and redevelop the site into a walkable, mixed-use area, of which there are precious few for miles around. I’d argue that in this mural you can feel the city playing catch-up with itself, trying to emerge from its bland suburban anonymity and invent an identity where none had previously existed.

In fairness, Popko told me she had no trouble mining Sterling Heights for material.

“To be honest, I feel like I ran out of letters,” she said.