Restoration of Pegasus sign is next step for new monument

(This story has been changed to correct information on who donated the Flying Red Horse to the City of Eden Prairie and how the Mobil station was changed to a Holiday Stationstore.)

There are monuments to our shared values, such as the Statue of Liberty. There are monuments to our collective history – the Eden Prairie Veterans Memorial, for example. Some monuments venerate people, real and imagined – think Paul Bunyan and Mary Tyler Moore. Others honor animals, like the Rothsay, Minnesota, prairie chicken. And some monuments defy explanation, including the 9-ton, 13-feet-wide ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota.

Soon to leap off the drawing board and onto the Eden Prairie landscape is a monument to a sign: the neon-lighted Flying Red Horse that for roughly 75 years stood high above a gas station and cafe along Flying Cloud Drive and signaled to all that, “You are in Eden Prairie!”

The late Marie Wittenberg, a longtime local newspaper columnist and member of the Eden Prairie Historical Society, wrote in 2011 that the horse sign was very popular over the years and acted almost like a lighthouse, with early pilots at Flying Cloud Airport using the blinking sign for direction.

The two-sided sign – about 12 feet tall and 17 feet wide – has been in storage since it was donated to the city in 2013 by Jesse Schwartz Jr., his wife Kathy and daughter Katie, who are part of the family that operated the Mobil gas station until it was sold and repurposed as a Holiday Stationstore.

But by year’s end, the giant red Pegasus – an immortal and majestic winged horse from ancient Greek mythology and symbol of Mobil gas stations for many years – will be placed atop a monument base at the corner of Flying Cloud Drive and Town Center Place, just a block from its former location.

Last month, the Eden Prairie City Council OK’d a $209,409 contract with Construction Results Corp. to restore the sign and its neon lighting, build a base for the monument, and proceed with construction.

Phase two will take place sometime next year, when the city will work in-house to add a plaza, benches, and interpretive signage to help make the monument a destination.

A much-talked-about artifact

What to do with Pegasus – declared by the city to be an official landmark in 1977 – has been the subject of much discussion and more than a few ideas over the last decade or so. At various times it seemed destined for indoor display at Eden Prairie Center or outdoor display at the baseball stadium just east of the Eden Prairie Community Center.

But the sliver of excess property left when tracks were laid along Flying Cloud Drive and Town Center Place for the Metro Green Line LRT Extension – also known as Southwest LRT – proved to be the winning solution. 

There, the LRT tracks round a bend, leaving a small piece of property nearest the street corner that the Metropolitan Council has allowed the city to use under a legal agreement. 

The combination of leftover land, a visible corner, and proximity to the original location helped dictate the location of the monument. “It just kind of checked all those boxes,” said Matt Bourne, the parks and natural resources manager for the City of Eden Prairie, who is in charge of the construction project.

That left city officials and WSB, a national design and consulting firm with offices in Minnesota, to come up with a monument design and a plan for restoring the sign, which needs a paint job and neon-lighting work.

The portion of the salvaged sign that says “Mobile” will be covered, and instead, a sign promoting Eden Prairie’s Town Center – the name occasionally used to label Eden Prairie’s “downtown” – will be incorporated into the design.

The horse will be painted to give it an antique look, and all will rest on a stone-faced monument positioned so that Flying Cloud motorists and riders on LRT trains – scheduled to begin operating in 2027 – can see it.

Construction bids ranged from $209,409 to $493,250. All were below an engineer’s preliminary estimate of $619,375, which was an uncertain number at best because the city has never done a project quite like this, Bourne said. It will be paid for with money from the city’s Capital Improvement Fund; a state grant will help pay for the interpretive signage.

“Our hope is that they’ll get started this summer, and have everything done by fall,” said Bourne. “It’s really going to depend on how long it takes to restore the sign.”

Eden Prairie isn’t the only city that has affection for the Pegasus sign. An original Mobil/Pegasus sign that also dates back to the 1930s has been restored and sits in the outdoor plaza of a Dallas hotel. A winged Pegasus is also the logo for Dallas’ WNBA team, the Wings.

Beth Novak Krebs, a senior planner who is staff liaison to the City of Eden Prairie’s Heritage Preservation Commission, says monuments like this help tie us together.

“Projects like the plaza and displaying the Flying Red Horse bring attention to something people might not know about the community,” she offered. “It’s an opportunity to educate the public about the history of a community. For some, these types of projects can evoke memories of days gone by, and for others, they can become part of new experiences and memories.”

So, a horse that witnessed Eden Prairie’s many changes over the decades will soon be back. Maybe Pegasus is immortal after all.