More than 300,000 vehicles tool down Loop 410 between San Pedro and McCullough Avenue in San Antonio, oblivious to the significance of the two boots located at the northeast corner of the North Star Mall. These are not just any pair of boots. They are a San Antonio landmark. Unlike the Alamo, which can be smaller than visitors might expect, these simulated full-quill ostrich boots are larger than life. A lot larger.
These are the World’s Largest Cowboy Boots. They stand at 35 feet, 3 inches high; 33 feet, 4 inches long; and 9 feet wide. A person would have to be 200 feet tall to model them. Big enough for each boot to hold 300,000 gallons of beer, according to its creator, the late artist and provocateur Bob “Daddy-O” Wade.
Wade made big art: a 70-foot-high saxophone sculpture in Houston, a 3D map of the United States the size of a football field in Dallas, a 13-foot-high six shooter in Del Rio, 10-foot-tall dancing frogs in Dallas, Carl’s Corner, and Nashville, Dino Bob nudging a VW beetle in Abilene, a giant New Orleans Saints helmet in Austin. No piece of his big art has been seen by so many people as the boots. The inspiration was his giant 40-foot-long wire-and-mesh iguana, which appeared on the roof of the building housing the Lone Star Café in New York City in 1978 before eventually landing at the Fort Worth Zoo.
The Washington Project for the Arts reached out to Wade in 1979. They wanted something as cool as the iguana for DC and had a vacant lot at the corner of 12th Street NW and G Street NW waiting to be filled. The arts organization bought him a cream-colored suit so he could hobnob with Texas politicians and hustle money, and paid him $7,000 to build a pair of giant boots using scavenged steel, wire mesh, and urethane foam. He made an adjacent sign identifying the project as The Biggest Cowboy Boots in the World, written in western rope script. The new monument in a city of monuments attracted gawkers and tourist buses. Joan Mondale, wife of U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, who at the time was known as Joan of Arts for her patronage of creatives, visited the site to converse with Wade.
After the boots’ three-month run in the lot, The Rouse Corporation, the Maryland shopping mall developer, purchased the piece for $20,000 for North Star Mall. The boots were disassembled and transported 1,600 miles to Texas on three flatbed trucks, a three-day journey completed with some difficulty. Wade even composed a country song about the experience, “Too Tall, Too Long, Too Wide.”
The boots were installed at the apex of North Star Mall in January 1980. In 2014, Guinness World Records named them the largest cowboy boot sculpture.
For the holiday season between Thanksgiving and early January, the boots are covered in 8,000 LED lights that form illuminated stars. “It takes a couple of days and a number of different lifts,” says North Star Mall senior general manager Brenda Crawford. “The contractor that does the install is very careful with how they are attaching the lights to the surface.”
The boots have been lit up pink for a breast cancer fundraiser and appeared in numerous commercials, including one for Corona beer. A couple seasons ago, the boots were involved in a promotional scavenger hunt for Yellowstone, with the Dutton family brand superimposed between the boots. The PETA animal-rights organization proposed installing an anti-leather banner adjacent to Wade’s sculpture that reads “give animal leather the boot,” but was turned down.
On any given day, you can see someone posing by the toes. Crawford acknowledges the boots as a selfie magnet. “People don’t think of them as art,” says Lisa Wade, Daddy-O’s widow, “they think of them as landmarks.”
Maintenance is constant. The mall performs regular inspections of the boots and maintains the landscaping around them. The last major refurbishment was in 2019 when the muralist Style Read repainted the boots. “He really restored the original vibrance, and added a clear coat to protect the paint,” Crawford says.
The boots have been mistaken for Lucchese boots, which were once made in San Antonio. Nope, they’re Justins, which were once made in Fort Worth. “Bob’s original title for the Washington exhibit was ‘Giant Justins,’” Crawford says.
Then there was the time the boots started smoking. Long ago, during the San Antonio rodeo, a country music radio station did broadcasts from the crow’s nest atop one boot, drawing sizeable crowds. An unknown person kicked a 3-foot hole in one of the heels (this is before the boots were cemented). Wade made plans to go to San Antonio to inspect the damage when he received a call from a mall rep: “Mr. Wade, Mr. Wade, we need you get down here fast! The boots are on fire!” The fire department was called, surrounding the boots when a disheveled figure emerged from the left boot. A man had taken up residence in the boot.
As Wade later wrote in the book Daddy-O: Iguana Heads & Texas Tales (St. Martin’s Press) : “The dude had set up a peep hole and an exhaust port. He cooked with sterno cans and smoked cigarettes inside with the high school kids. On that particular day, his lunch and his cigs got out of hand and smoke poured out of the top of the boot.”
Wade returned in 1993 for a media op with the boots. “I was asked to climb to the top of the boot one more time,” he wrote in Iguana Heads & Texas Tales. “As I got closer to the top, I passed stray beer bottles and a spray can graffiti message. I made it up to the old crow’s nest, waved to the camera crew down below, and climbed back down, made the 6 O’Clock News that night.”
“They’re a great piece of art,” Crawford says. “I’m just grateful we get to maintain them and keep them for the next generations. I’d like to think they were Bob’s favorite piece. They are bigger than life, just like Bob.”
