A polished stainless steel fork 35 feet tall stands tines up in the parking lot of an office building on West Chesterfield Boulevard in southwest Springfield, Missouri. Its weight is usually given as 11 tons, though some accounts halve that, and no engineering figure settles it. It was built in the late 1990s for the Greenhouse Market, a short lived restaurant on South Glenstone Avenue owned by Bob Noble of the Springfield advertising firm Noble and Associates. The restaurant closed, and in 1999 the fork was moved to the agency's own headquarters in Chesterfield Village and planted outside the door. Noble sold the agency to a Pittsburgh firm in 2017 and the buildings the year after, and the fork stayed with the property. It changed hands again in 2023, to a company registered as Tenedor Pesado, which is Spanish for heavy fork. Springfield calls it the world's largest fork, and the title depends on what is being measured. Guinness recognises an eight metre fork standing in Lake Geneva at Vevey, Switzerland. Creede, Colorado has a 40 foot aluminum fork angled against a building, put up in 2012 by Chev and Ted Yund expressly to beat Springfield's, and Fairview, Oregon raised a 37 foot one in 2022. What is generally claimed for the Springfield fork is that it is the heaviest of them. It has become a standard photograph for visitors to the city, and the singer Chappell Roan, who grew up in Willard a few miles up the road, put it in the video for her song Hot to Go.
Getting there
37.1454, -93.3233
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