The controversy over the Christopher Columbus statue in San Jose’s City Hall has put a spotlight on the statue we love to mock: Quetzalcoatl.

Related Articles Map: Interactive light displays, downtown San Jose An observer’s first reaction to “Plumed Serpent” is likely “How in the world did that thing end up in the middle of San Jose’s downtown?”

No, that’s not true. The first reaction is “Ha ha! Dog poop!” But after the laughter subsides, one begins to wonder about the decision-making process. And to understand that, one needs to know that the decision is not about just one statue. The story of Quetzalcoatl involves two statues that never saw the sunlight and one that was exiled for years to a warehouse.

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Statue No. 1: Diving horses and whiskbroom cows

In the late 1980s, sculptor Robert Graham — a San Jose State alumnus and vaunted creator of the Olympic Gateway outside Los Angeles Memorial Stadium — submitted drawings and models for “gateways” to downtown San Jose.

To straddle Santa Clara Street at Sixth Street: Thirty-foot-high inverted L’s topped by trees. Midway up each is a platform like a diving board. Standing on each board — “mustering up the courage to dive off,” as one Mercury News writer described it — is a bronze horse.

For the strip of land then called Gore Park, a skinny triangle where Market and First converge: Two life-size bronze longhorn steers, bearing on their backs a 30-foot-tall shaft, topped by a spray of lighted wires.

Both ideas were ridiculed by local pundits and, after initially approving the design, the city abandoned the idea. Graham was paid about $60,000 for the work. But, if you believe the whispered scuttlebutt, the rejection was a black little stone in his heart.

Statue No. 2: Thomas Fallon

Around the time the horses and cows were kicked to the curb, San Jose Mayor Thomas McEnery spearheaded a drive for an equestrian statue of his 19th-century predecessor Thomas Fallon, to be displayed on the traffic island at the north end of downtown’s Plaza Park (now Plaza de Cesar Chavez).

The resistance to the glorification of a man many saw as hostile to the native and Californio peoples doomed the $440,000 statue to more than a decade in an Oakland warehouse. It was finally placed in a pocket park at Julian and St. James streets. Amid recent roadwork, it was moved several yards closer to the Highway 87 ramps.

Statue No. 3: The big shiny winged serpent

After Fallon, the city wasn’t going to make that anglocentric mistake again. In 1992, it again turned to Graham, offering him $400,000 for what was described as 20- to 25-foot-tall bronze depiction of the Aztec serpent god Quetzalcoatl, wings outstretched, with a tall base 15 to 20 feet in diameter that people could walk inside.

Graham this time asked that his drawings and models be kept from the public (and newspaper writers).

Statue No. 4: Park God. Spell it backward.

What San Jose got was not a two-story-tall bronze, but a squat, coiled snake of cast stone — eight feet tall including its non-walk-insidable base — that bore an uncanny resemblance to a massive dog dropping.

Graham later told Mercury News art critic Jack Fischer that a trip to Mexico had convinced him to shift his direction away from the winged creature. There were reportedly also concerns by police that the tall base of the initial proposal would become a hangout for ne’er-do-wells.

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And there are those who believe that it was Graham’s revenge against the city that had rejected his gateways.

Whatever the reason, it was the Quetzalpoop that was installed at the south end of Plaza de Cesar Chavez in 1994.

Moved to make way for it was a large bell, a memorial to fallen firefighters. Some perceived this as disrespect, adding to the list of complaints against the statue.

Opponents of the snake filed a lawsuit claiming that the “god” was an illegal promotion of religion on public property. In 1996 a federal court ruling out of San Francisco rejected the claim. And so Quetzl remains, inspiring bafflement among visitors and head-shaking scorn among locals.