Milwaukee Removes Fonzie Statue Amid Reckoning With Greaser Previous

MILWAUKEE—Calling the trouble a protracted overdue try to deal with town’s checkered historical past, Milwaukee officers introduced Friday that they’d eliminated the enduring riverfront Fonzie statue amid an ongoing reckoning with the city’s greaser previous. “Within the 12 months 2025, nobody ought to be celebrating the darkish period on this metropolis when bikes, leather-based jackets, and necking dominated our streets,” mentioned Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who held a press convention on the former website of the controversial statue referred to as the Bronze Fonz, telling Milwaukeeans it was additionally time to think about renaming Pinky Tuscadero Park. “It’s laborious to think about being a younger buttoned-up sq. or egghead strolling previous this monument, understanding full properly that it commemorated a person who might need revved his engine at you at any second. In fact, there’s a sanitized narrative that being a greaser was all thumbs-up and fixing jukeboxes. However we all know higher than that. We ought to be condemning Arthur Fonzarelli for repeatedly urging Ralph Malph and Potsie to ‘sit on it’—not preserving him in bronze.” Johnson added that town deliberate to soften down the statue to make a soda fountain the place bobby-soxers may congregate with out worry of being creamed.