Tarentum's Hebe statue does her part by donning colorful face mask

A statue of the Greek goddess Hebe is making a fashionable public health statement at one of the Alle-Kiski Valley’s busiest intersections.

The 5-foot, 500-pound statue at the foot of the Tarentum Bridge on the Tarentum side of the Allegheny River is wearing a colorful floral mask with a yellow straw hat.

“It reminds everybody going across the Tarentum Bridge to be safe,” said Cindy Homburg, the Tarentum historian who normally dresses the statue for holidays.

Homburg said she might add a colorful scarf and perhaps a bonnet in advance of the Easter holiday.

“But the mask is not coming off until the governor tells us to,” she said.

The decked-out Hebe statue is Tarentum’s third since the early 1900s, when the Tarentum Book Club bought the first one. It was taken out by a hit-and-run driver and replaced by the current statue in 2014.

A second statue stood in for the original while it was being refurbished in the 1980s. That statue, which now stands in the borough’s Riverview Memorial Park, was not wearing a mask as of Monday afternoon.