that also immediately caught my eye upon seeing that totem! turns out it belongs to the alaskan tlingit indians.
here is the remainder of the article. (nice find by the way!)
Tlingit totem pole
Alaskan Tlingit Indians cried foul in 2000 when this seven-headed totem pole, which stood in Victory Park for decades, was taken down. The Tlingits protested that the pole was sacred, a cherished part of their heritage, and it must come home. But they never came to get it. The city, for its part, doesn't want to throw it in the chipper for fear of further offending the Tlingits. So the totem pole lays outstretched in abandoned Firehouse 5, seven years and counting, its heads grimacing at the heavens in frustration.
Pixie Woods Volcano
Built in 1972, the volcano in Pixie Woods kiddie park belches smoke when triggered by remote control by the Captain of the Pixie Queen riverboat or the engineer of the train. Now Ron Farnsworth, an artist who worked for Hollywood and Disneyland, is giving the volcano an extreme volcano makeover. It'll be more of a South Seas volcano, with orange lava, black-glittering slopes, tropical vegetation, and a waterfall. The tiki god would approve.
Mummified cat
In its Ancient Arts Gallery, The Haggin Museum displays a grotesque pickled pet. Dedicated to the cat-god Bast, the ancient preserved puss is sitting, tightly wrapped in linens, with its head painted black and red kitty-cat ears daubed on. Stay, kitty. Good kitty.
Stupid Blinking Stoplight
When Weberstown Mall opened in 1964, city traffic engineers planted this stoplight in the median out front of main entrance. Then, deciding it was not needed, they just set it on a pointless "yellow blink." The stupid blinking stoplight has stood there ever since, with nary a red or a green in 43 years.
California Street necropolis
Hundreds of deceased inmates of the 19th-century Stockton State Asylum lie buried beneath the buildings along North California Street. An expedient Stockton judge officially declared the graveyard empty in the 1950s so the land could be rezoned, sold and developed. It's not empty. Managers of area offices can truly boast they have hundreds of people under them.
Electric Avenue
At the western edge of Brookside, the abrupt edge of the city, Brookview Drive terminates in a strange parkway. A walkway meanders for a bush-lined block beneath high-tension power lines to the levee at Tenmile Slough. It's a nicely landscaped path to nowhere. At the end there's a bench at the base of a high-tension tower for those who like to sit beneath 160,000 volts. In the summer, tomato trucks roar across the levee, and the scene goes from unusual to Felliniesque.
