What's up with these decaying Hugo the Hornet statues on the side of the road?

There are two giant models of the Charlotte Hornets mascot sitting in a pile of junk off of a busy highway. Where did they come from, and how come nobody's noticed them until now?

I have seen a lot of dead bugs in my life. These are different:

Your eyes are not deceiving you. That is a very large Hugo the Hornet just lying there on its side, missing its cartoonishly gloved right hand. It appears to be near a highway of some sort. And there’s more than one. There’s a blue leg sitting in front of a dumpster. Which, if you are a young, impressionable Charlotte Hornets fan, is the stuff of nightmares. The hive was alive, you’d say, bolting upright in your bed. But Hugo was DEAD!

I saw that tweet and thought it might something to write about for the Rabbit Hole. Once again, though, I was told I had no choice:

I’ve solved other Hugo-related mysteries in the past. How hard could this one be?

First off, let’s look at some of the context here. I recognized the red brick walls from my years of living in Charlotte. I originally thought it might be up along Interstate 77 north of uptown, but an eagle-eyed follower said this was actually along Independence Boulevard where it meets Albemarle Road. Says Hank Lee: “I can't think of any other place where there's a two-lane road in the middle of a highway with an on-ramp.”

Next, I got in touch with the guy who posted the pics, a guy who does traffic reports for radio stations who goes by @clt_TrafficGuy on Twitter. Turns out the picture was from one of many traffic cameras that are set up along highways. Here’s a wider view from one of them, which clearly shows the Albemarle Road interchange:

You can also see the second Hugo, along with a dumpster and a lot of junk nearby.

After that, I got in touch with a former Hornets employee, who didn’t remember the big hornets being displayed anywhere inside the arena over the last two years, and thought it might have been some stuff from a warehouse that got thrown out. He encouraged me to talk to Evan Kent.

Evan and I go back. Some 12 years ago, I talked to him when I was working on a Charlotte magazine story about a grassroots effort to change the name of the Charlotte Bobcats to the Hornets. When I started reporting it out, it was a whimsical story. By the end, it was a real possibility, and a few years later it became a reality, thanks to the relentless pushing of Evan and a bunch of others. He literally (wait for it) brought back the buzz.

Anyway, if anyone would know, it would be Evan, who morphed all of that energy into The Crown Club. “Pretty sure it’s just some leftover pieces from a billboard,” he messaged me. “I think Novant Health.”

He was right. A little internet sleuthing turned up a photo gallery of a large 3D Hugo going up on a Novant Health billboard just off I-277 near the AvidXchange Music Factory. There’s also a video:

Hugo is 19 feet tall! THAT’S A BIG OL’ BUG.

The video’s from November 2014, but the actual Hugo was hoisted into place on October 16 according to WSOC-TV, which flew a helicopter over it. Another hornet went up on a second Novant billboard along I-277. This all happened just a few months after the official name change was announced with a video of Hugo waving a Buzz City flag on top of the arena.

It’s hard to tell exactly where that second billboard was, because neither one shows up on Google Street view. The imagery from that area was taken in May 2014, and again in July 2015, and there’s no Hugo to be found.

So I went to the Mecklenburg County Time Machine, which has aerial imagery of the Charlotte area going back to 1938. A satellite shot from March 29, 2015 shows the top of Hugo’s head in front of the billboard, but it’s gone a few months later. The 19 foot Hugos didn’t even last a full year in their respective perches.

So, where did they go? And where have they been all this time?

Well, um, they’ve been in the same place. Behind a wall off of Independence Boulevard near Albemarle Road.

The same satellite imagery website that showed Hugo along I-277 on March 29, 2015 also showed the two bugs sitting in a small junkyard that October. It’s the same junkyard where they are today.

Satellite imagery of the dead Hugos lying near Independence Boulevard on October 21, 2015.

So if these things have been there for about nine years, how come nobody noticed them until now?

Well, some people noticed. “There's another Hugo laying around at another dump that people have been taking pictures of for years and sending to us,” Evan Kent messaged me. “A tradition now I think.” My educated guess: It’s the same Hugos in the same dump, but just seen from ground level. This piece of property belongs to Adams Outdoor, which owns a bunch of billboards around Charlotte. It used to be home to some commercial buildings that were demolished around 20 years ago when Independence was upgraded to an expressway. For at least ten years now, it’s been a graveyard for old marketing campaigns, and you can see other chunks of billboards strewn around. At least from the aerial images, anyway. What’s there is up on a hill above Pierson Drive, and hard to see from the street. From time to time, though, someone would go up to the chain-link gate, snap a pic of a large dead Hugo and send it to Evan.

So if that’s the case, then why are we talking about it now? Because the traffic camera that shows it is fairly new. “I just started looking around yesterday,” @Clt_TrafficGuy told me. “I saw some junk down there but never bothered to check into it.”

So in summary: An ad agency commissioned two 19-foot-tall Hugo the Hornets to go on billboards near Uptown Charlotte a decade ago. Those bugs were in place for less than a year before being taken down and unceremoniously dumped in a billboard junkyard on the east side of town. They then sat there for nine years before anyone other than curious urban explorers noticed them. One part of me thinks this is somewhat existential: We, like Hugo, will all at some point have been dead longer than we were alive. Another part just keeps repeating the old NBC slogan: “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!”

I’ve reached out to the ad agency and to Adams because I still have some questions here. Namely: Why are those things still just sitting there, rotting away? Why not auction them off like, say, a giant foam Sphinx or, maybe, a pair of fiberglass Chick-fil-A cows that are currently selling on eBay for $2,700? Isn’t there anything else that could be done with them? Evan Kent thinks so. “Crown Club would love it for our tailgate spot! We'll put him right out front on 5th Street,” he said, before adding: “Not even joking lol.” I know Evan. I know.

UPDATE (10/22/24): Well, we may have ruined it. Here’s a video from last week of one of the Hugos being loaded into a Dumptster. Sorry.

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