How Metropolis earned the score
Population 5,969 (US Census 2020), the seat of Massac County at the southern tip of Illinois on the Ohio River.
Situation The only American town named Metropolis, one bridge from Paducah and a long way from everywhere else, holding the one name in the atlas that matches Superman’s city.
Action In January 1972 the town and DC’s publisher made the connection official, then built a 15 foot bronze, a 70,000 item museum, a Lois Lane statue, and a June festival with its own drone show.
Result The Hometown of Superman draws 20,000 to 25,000 to the Superman Celebration, crowds estimated as high as 80,000 to October’s Fort Massac Encampment, and holds the number one TripAdvisor spot in town with a Travelers’ Choice award.
Situation: named for a city that did not exist yet
Stand at the corner of Market and Superman Square in far southern Illinois and you are looking at a county courthouse with a 15 foot painted bronze Superman planted in front of it, fists on hips, boots on a plaza of engraved bricks, a plinth reading Truth, Justice, the American Way. In most county seats that spot belongs to a general on a horse. In Metropolis, Illinois, it belongs to the Man of Steel, and the seat of Massac County government works quietly behind his cape.
The name came first, by more than a century. A Pittsburgh merchant and a local landowner platted the town in 1839 where the Ohio River bends past a good landing, and they named it for the city they were sure it would become, according to the town’s recorded history. The great city never arrived. The railroads and the river trade made other fortunes, and Metropolis settled into the life of a small county seat. The 2020 census counted 5,969 residents, down from 6,537 in 2010. It is the kind of town America has thousands of, except for one thing no other town on earth can claim.
What Metropolis did have, long before the cape, was history and a riverfront. Fort Massac, first built by the French in the 1750s and rebuilt in 1794 on George Washington’s orders, guarded this stretch of the Ohio and hosted Lewis and Clark on their way west. The fort grounds became Illinois’ first state park in 1908. And after 1938, the town had a coincidence: the most famous superhero on earth lived, in the comics, in a gleaming city called Metropolis. For thirty four years the coincidence just sat there, unused.
Task: turn a name into a reason to exit the interstate
The assignment facing Metropolis was the one facing every small town that is rich in story and short on traffic. Paducah, Kentucky, the nearest city, is fifteen minutes across the bridge. Nashville and St. Louis are each about three hours away. Interstate 24 runs past the edge of town carrying people somewhere else. A name alone does not stop a car. To convert the coincidence into an economy, the town needed four things.
Permission
Superman is not public property. Any serious claim on the character needed the blessing of the publisher that owned him, which in 1972 was National Periodical Publications, the company the world now knows as DC Comics.
An icon you can photograph
A designation is a press release. A statue is a destination. The town needed something physical to stand in front of, at any hour, for free.
A calendar, and beds
One photo stop does not hold a visitor overnight. Metropolis needed recurring reasons to come back, and somewhere for the crowd to sleep when it did.
Action: adopted in three weeks, built over fifty years
The adoption itself moved at comic book speed. On January 6, 1972, the Metropolis Chamber of Commerce put out a press release staking the town’s claim to its hero, and the wire services ran with it. Fifteen days later, on January 21, 1972, representatives of National Periodical Publications stood with city and state dignitaries and a very excited town as Metropolis officially adopted Superman, according to the town’s own account of the ceremony. That June the state made it formal: on June 9, 1972, the Illinois House of Representatives declared Metropolis the Hometown of Superman, per the history kept by Roadside America. The weekly newspaper leaned all the way in and has published as The Metropolis Planet ever since.
The first build was too big. In 1973 an exhibition called The Amazing World of Superman opened, and its backers sketched a 50 million dollar, thousand acre theme park anchored by a 200 foot Superman statue that visitors would drive beneath. Then OPEC shut off the oil, the bankers shut off the money, and the museum closed after roughly a year. The town kept three things out of the wreck: the license, the resolution, and the name.
The 200 foot Superman that never was
The 1973 plan, as recorded by Roadside America, called for a thousand acres, 50 million dollars, and a Superman tall enough that cars would pass between his boots on the way in. The 1973 oil embargo killed the financing within the year. It reads today like a blessing in disguise. The park would have put the attraction outside town and priced it like a destination. What Metropolis eventually built instead sits on the courthouse square, costs nothing to see, and has outlasted every gas crisis since.
The rebuild was slower, smaller, and it held. In June 1979 the town threw its first Superman Celebration, a festival that has run every summer since. In 1986 it put up a seven foot fiberglass Superman that cost about a thousand dollars, and local marksmen promptly tested whether the statue was faster than a speeding bullet. It was not. So in 1993 Metropolis did it properly: citizens bought more than 3,400 engraved bricks at 35 dollars apiece to raise roughly 120,000 dollars, and a 15 foot Superman, modeled by sculptor Gary Ernest Smith and cast in bronze, went up in front of the courthouse, per the historical marker on the square and the Library of Congress photo record. The donors’ names are still underfoot on the plaza.
Nineteen ninety three turned out to be the hinge year twice over. Across the street from the new statue, lifelong collector Jim Hambrick opened the Super Museum, moving a collection he had started with a childhood lunch box into a downtown storefront that now holds more than 70,000 items, from movie props to one of the few George Reeves television costumes still in existence, behind a hand painted Action Comics mural. And that February, a riverboat casino tied up at the foot of town: Players, a venture co-founded by entertainer Merv Griffin and one of the first casinos licensed in Illinois, which became Harrah’s Metropolis in 2000 and added a 258 room hotel and event center in 2006. The square gave visitors a reason to stop. The boat gave them a reason to stay until morning.
Why the bronze is projectile proof
The 1986 fiberglass Superman lasted less than a decade because passersby kept shooting it to see if the Man of Steel could take it, a failure mode recorded with some relish by Roadside America. The 1993 replacement is bronze and, in the town’s phrasing, projectile proof. There is a lesson in the upgrade: a roadside icon is infrastructure, and infrastructure gets built to survive its public. Metropolis paid for the durable version with 35 dollar bricks instead of waiting for a grant that was never coming.
The square kept accumulating. In 2010 it got its second resident: a six foot bronze of actress Noel Neill as Lois Lane, unveiled June 11, 2010 at Eighth and Market, sculpted again by Gary Ernest Smith, as covered by Silly America’s field report. Neill, who played Lois Lane in the 1948 serials and the 1950s Adventures of Superman television series, had been a regular guest of the festival for years, and Metropolis calls her its First Lady. She traveled from California to meet her own statue. Around both bronzes, downtown wears the theme on its walls: comic panel murals, Superman awnings, a gift economy of capes.
Result: two crowds a year and the number one thing in town
The clearest result arrives every June. The Superman Celebration, held downtown the second weekend of the month since 1979, is expected by the Metropolis Area Chamber of Commerce to draw 20,000 to 25,000 people, with coverage over the years putting peak crowds near 30,000. The 2025 edition ran June 13 to 15 with Dean Cain and Supergirl voice actress Anais Fairweather among the guests, and closed with a 200 drone light show by Skyglow Drones that flew Superman over the rooftops, per the Superman Homepage’s report. Do the arithmetic against the 2020 census and the festival is roughly four visitors for every resident.
The statue itself now performs like the anchor it was built to be. On TripAdvisor it holds a 4.3 rating across 677 reviews with a Travelers’ Choice award, which the platform reserves for the top ten percent of listings worldwide, and it ranks number one of the fifteen things to do in town. It is free, it is open at 3 a.m., and it converts interstate curiosity into Market Street foot traffic that the museum, the gift shops, and the cafes get next.
Then the town does it again in October, in a different century. The Fort Massac Encampment has re-created 1700s garrison life at the state park every fall since 1974, with more than 300 reenactors staging drills, mock battles, and period trades, and total crowds estimated at more than 80,000 across the weekend at its height. A town that could easily have been a one weekend wonder built itself a second season with assets it already owned: the oldest state park in Illinois and the river that made the fort matter.
Between the peaks, the machine idles instead of stopping. Harrah’s Metropolis keeps 258 rooms and a year round entertainment calendar at the foot of Ferry Street, the Super Museum opens every day of the week, and tourism stands with the courthouse and the riverfront industries among the small city’s principal employers, per the town’s economic profile. The newspaper is still the Planet. The water tower still wears the shield. The commitment, fifty four years in, reads as total, and that is precisely what the Visitor Impact Score rewards it for.
Takeaway: license the story, then out-patience it
Metropolis did not invent an attraction. It noticed one it had owned since 1839, its own name, and then did the unglamorous things that turn a coincidence into a franchise. It asked permission, so the claim is exclusive: DC has sanctioned exactly one Hometown of Superman, and this is it. It right-sized the build after the thousand acre dream collapsed, letting a courthouse square do the work a theme park could not afford to. It let citizens fund the icon 35 dollars at a time, which bought durability and, more valuably, ownership. And it programmed two seasons, June in the comics and October in the 1700s, so the calendar never depends on a single weekend.
The open work is visible from the public grades. Brand consistency is the softest front: the Superman identity is carried by the city, the chamber, the museum, and the festival in different visual dialects, and a unified kit would sharpen every channel at once. Downtown and curb appeal grade below the anchor, which is the polite way of saying the square is world class for a photograph and thinner for a whole afternoon; every storefront that opens between the statue and the river compounds the visit. None of that requires a new idea. The town already proved it can wait out an oil embargo, a shot up statue, and five decades of skeptics. Patience, in Metropolis, is the renewable resource.