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The Missing Monument
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The Missing Monument
By |
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| ON Sunday, October 19, 1947, fifteen thousand people gathered in the rain to witness the dedication of the site for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial in Riverside Park. Jewish leaders, city officials, foreign diplomats and over 100 concentration camp survivors watched as a scroll describing the last defense of the Warsaw Ghetto was placed beneath an inscribed cornerstone. Speaking about the Nazi assault and the heroic resistance by the Jews of Warsaw, Mayor William O'Dwyer declared, "That tragic event is one of the most stirring in history. I cannot imagine any motif more appropriate for the monument." 1 As the Mayor lay the concrete for the cornerstone, the sun broke through the grey afternoon mist. | 1 |
| Seventeen years later, the New York City Art Commission rejected two proposals for the still-unbuilt monument, arguing that the motif was not, in fact, appropriate for the park. A New York Times editorial in favor of the Commission's rejection argued against any future park monuments and helped to ensure that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial would never be built. Today the inscribed cornerstone still sits in Riverside Park between 83rd and 84th Streets, isolated by a low square iron fence, reminding passers-by of an unkept promise. | 2 |
We looked over various sites on Riverside Drive. As we were passing Eighty-Fourth Street I noticed a bearded rabbi leaning over the wall feeding pigeons. We stopped the car. The rabbi's presence seemed to point prophetically to the spot for the memorial to the six million slaughtered Jews. 2 | 3 |
| Jo Davidson was arguably the finest portrait sculptor of his day. His renditions of celebrated figures include busts of Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, David Ben-Gurion and a sculpture of Gertrude Stein that sits in Bryant Park. Proponents of the Warsaw Uprising monument enlisted Davidson's help for the project because "they had been told that they had to obtain the services of a reputable sculptor or architect before the Park Commission would consider a possible site for their project." 3 After selecting the site and making extensive preparations for the monument's construction, Davidson received some painful news: "The committee which sponsored the project acted up at the last minute and refused my sketch. They tried to buy me off on conditions that I could not possibly accept. My disappointment and indignation brought on my third heart attack." 4 | 4 |
| Davidson's ordeal illustrates the poor planning and frustration that surrounded the project until its final veto by the Arts Commission and the New York Times. A subsequent design for the monument, submitted by Columbia University architecture professor Percival Goodman, was rejected by the New York City Parks Department. Two years later, ground was broken for a giant sculpture of the Ten Commandments' tablets, but fundraising efforts faltered after the death of one of its designers, architect Erich Mendelsohn. In 1964 two separate committees enlisted the services of sculptor Nathan Rappaport and submitted his designs to the New York City Art Commission, who shut the door on a monument in Riverside park, seemingly for all time. | 5 |
| "How would we answer other special groups who wanted to be similarly represented on public land?" 5 rationalized a spokesperson for the Art Commission. If the Commission did have serious fears about allowing too many monuments onto city park land, they should have found a different reason for rejecting a proposal than to say that it served only the interests of a "special group." Such a statement does not take into account the nature and history of Riverside Park's existing monuments. | 6 |
| Grant's Tomb, the oldest and most grand of the Riverside monuments, is a shining example of what one such "special group" can accomplish when it focuses its vision. New York City's African-American community provided most of the political impetus and funding for the project in its early stages. In particular, the organizational prowess of Richard Greener, the Secretary of the Grant Monument Association and the first black graduate of Harvard, ensured that this shrine to our 18th President and Civil War hero did not end up in some other city. Greener, who had known Ulysses S. Grant as a friend, had to fend off rival municipalities who tried to pressure Grant's family into giving up the General's remains. | 7 |
| Richard Greener's leadership should have provided a model for proponents of the Warsaw Uprising Memorial; for example, Greener organized a design competition in order to gather proposals for the final shape of the monument. When the first competition in 1888 did not produce a satisfactory design, he held another competition between five prominent architects, Henry Ogden Avery among them, before settling on the design by John H. Duncan for Grant's Tomb as we know it today. Seventy-five years later, the people hoping to build the Warsaw Memorial at 84th Street did not muster this degree of coordination. Instead of selecting a single design to present to the New York City Art Commission, two separate groups, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization and the Artur Zygelboim Memorial Committee, made separate proposals. Rather than favoring either group, the city rejected both. A unified front might have been more effective. | 8 |
| The Artur Zygelboim Memorial Committee, formed 14 years after the original dedication of the memorial site in Riverside Park, was something of a loose cannon that may have undermined the cause for a Warsaw Uprising Memorial. Their proposed sculpture honoring Artur Zygelboim, a Jewish-Polish politician and supporter of the Warsaw resistance fighters, was described by the art commission as "a bronze figure engulfed in thorns and flames, sharply leaning to the front as if about to fall; emerging from the inferno are heads and hands calling to humanity for rescue." 6 In the eyes of the City Art Commission, this design clearly stepped outside acceptable bounds for public sculpture. Since the Arthur Zygelboim Memorial Committee represented a splinter group attempting to honor a particular individual, it served to stiffen the Art Commission's resistance to the proposals of "special groups." | 9 |
| Of course, many of the sculptures in Riverside Park pay tribute to "special" groups and individuals. At the 116th Street entrance to the park, a 1910 marble relief by Bruno Louis Zimm commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Woman's Health Protective Association of New York City. This association was a Progressive-Era citizens' advocate group that lobbied city, state and federal governments for health, sanitation, and pure food and drug legislation. The monument consists of a drinking fountain and a pair of benches which bear the names of the Association's most prominent members—New York City women, mostly West Side residents whose self-tribute has outlived their organization's membership. The monument's artwork, a carved relief of a woman holding a lamp, enriches the park's ambiance much like the cool, clean water flowing from its marble drinking fountain enriches passers-by on a summer day. | 10 |
| The Woman's Health Protective Association Fountain was overlooked in a 1993 Village Voice article bemoaning the scarcity of women represented in New York City's Sculptural tributes. This article did include Anna Hyatt Huntington's exquisite 1915 bronze equestrian statue of Joan of Arc, which was installed in Riverside Park at 93rd Street on a pedestal made partially from stones taken from the cathedral where she was imprisoned. Joan of Arc was not enshrined as a feminist symbol (feminists are often called a "special group" even today) but as a brave martyr to her country and a devout Catholic who ultimately achieved sainthood. Far from being the symbolic property of Catholics, Franco-Americans and feminists, St. Joan remains an inspiration to people of all nations. In this same fashion, a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance would serve the interests of civilized people everywhere, not simply New Yorkers of Jewish and Polish descent. | 11 |
| This feeling of public spirit inspired Americans of Magyar origin to immortalize Hungarian patriot Louis (Lajos) Kossuth in bronze. The Kossuth statue, created by John Horvay and erected in 1928 at Riverside Drive and 113th Street, stands on a granite pedestal with bronze figures on its base, representations of a Hungarian peasant and a soldier holding the national flag. The Kossuth statue is as much a tribute to the revolutionary fervor that spread like a liberating wave across Europe in 1848 as it is a monument to a single individual. A dissident turned national leader, Lajos Kossuth helped topple the Hapsburg dynasty before emigrating to the United States. Today, the statue stands as one of the few visible reminders of the Hungarian-American community's presence on the Upper West Side. Their gift to the park reminds us of their place in America's melting pot. | 12 |
| Upper West Side residents are aware of the prominence of the local Jewish community. The neighborhood boasts synagogues of all types, from Reconstructionist to Hasidic, ranging in style and grandeur from storefronts to huge, finely wrought edifices. On Friday evenings and Saturdays, families dressed for Shabbat observance fill the sidewalks of this corner of Manhattan. There are few neighborhoods in the country for whom a tribute to the defense of the Warsaw Ghetto would have more meaning. If time and demographics change the neighborhood, and the Jewish population becomes less visible, like the Hungarian-Americans and other groups whose presence is no longer obvious, it would be a shame to see no marker of Jewish history left to remind us of a people who have called this neighborhood their home. | 13 |
| Moses' Legacy | |
| Walking south from Grant's Tomb, one starts on a path through one of New York's best kept secrets and one of the Upper West Side's most valued treasures, the long, thin stretch of green along the Hudson called Riverside Park. Thousands of local residents use its playgrounds, tennis courts, dog runs and jogging trails, yet it remains one of the most placid, beatific spots on the city. Its combination of greenery and human design make it a success story of urban planning: a beautiful, functional park. | 14 |
| The beauty of Riverside Park comes not just from the trees and grasses that valiantly resist the strains of city living and help New Yorkers forget these same strains. The human hand is everywhere, of course—the granite walls, the flagstone paths and especially the sculptures and monuments contribute their share to the park's pleasant ambiance. Like Grant's tomb, the monuments that crop up at regular intervals along the Riverside trail help transport the visitor away from the mundane concerns and stresses of the here and now by presenting something different and perhaps better, a work of art and a landmark of history. | 15 |
| On Saturday, February 13, 1965, a New York Times editorial asked "whether the city's parks are a proper place for the erection of monuments." The Times declared that "each new installation brings one more invasion of the open land that was carefully landscaped by men of vision as long as a century ago." 7 The newspaper's editors took up the issue as a matter of principle, drawing a line in the sand of history beyond which no more monuments should be built. The "men of vision," presumably the park's designer, Frederick Law Olmstead, and his associates, would have considered the addition new statuary to be a defilement. Such reasoning might have been more sound if Olmstead's original vision of the park had remained intact; however, by the middle of the twentieth century, Riverside Park had been altered beyond all recognition. Seemingly unaware of this basic fact, the New York Times' editors flaunted their ignorance of the park's history even more brazenly than did the Art Commission. | 16 |
Olmstead had thought Grant's Tomb inappropriate for a recreational setting, and he resisted the idea of installing the monument in the park. He could not have foreseen that monument-building was a trivial threat compared to the destructive power of progress. When the city gave right-of-way privileges to the New York Central railway line, they allowed the park to be split down the middle and violated in a manner that it could not resist. In the early twentieth century, the young Robert Moses would look down from Riverside Drive and see before him
a wasteland six miles long, stretching from where he stood all the way north to 181st street...the 'park' was nothing but a vast low-lying mass of dirt and mud. Unpainted, rusting, jagged wire fences along the tracks barred the city from its waterfront...the engines that pulled trains along the tracks burned coal or oil; from their smokestacks a dense black smog rose toward the apartment houses, coating windowsills with grit...[a stench] seemed to hang over Riverside Drive endlessly after each passage of a train carrying south to the slaughterhouses in downtown Manhattan carload after carload of cattle and pigs. 8 | 17 |
| Whatever one may think of the heavy-handed ways of Robert Moses, one has to admit that he resurrected Riverside Park. In the midst of the Great Depression, when the park was one long shantytown subsisting off its many garbage dumps, Moses transformed the park into its present shape. By covering the railroad tracks and running the Henry Hudson Parkway alongside, hidden by the landscaping and topography, he crafted both a bucolic recreational setting and an efficient modern speedway. Today from the West 70s up to 125th Street, people jog and play nearly oblivious to the railroad tracks below them, on land that had once been hazardous and unusable. The land on which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial's cornerstone rests is the creation of Robert Moses. Robert Moses personally sanctioned the construction of a monument on that site. Perhaps Frederick Law Olmstead would not have approved of Moses' changes, but by then it was no longer Olmstead's park. | 18 |
| Since 1965, the city has seemingly resolved the issue of whether or not new sculpture has a place in the park. From playground fountains and bronze hippopotomi to a 40 foot grasshopper that loomed near the unbuilt memorial for a time and then mysteriously disappeared, users of Riverside Park have become accustomed to seeing works of art crop up in their midst. Most recently, a puffy, slightly abstract grey totem made its way onto a hill a stone's throw away from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial site. Called the "Pillsbury Dough Buddha" by some, this new statue quickly became integrated into the life of the park. | 19 |
| The Case for Martyrs | |
In memory of our Marine heroes. Marine Corps Fathers' Association of New York | |
| Attempting to justify the rejection of the Artur Zygelboim statue, a City Art Commission member reasoned, "The figure is depicted in so tragic a posture that it does not seem appropriate for location on park land intended for recreation and relaxation. It does not seem to be desirable to confront children with sculpture of such distressing and horrifying significance worthy as it might be in a more relevant place. I can reach no other conclusion than that a public park is not a proper place for it." 9 | 20 |
| Had the Commission rejected the Zygelboim statue on strictly aesthetic grounds, they might have had a more solid case. The proposed memorial departed too radically from the formats of conventional public monuments to merit final approval. However, by asserting that a statue is inappropriate for a public park because of the disturbing nature of its message and content, they displayed a profound ignorance of the history of American memorial statuary. In Riverside Park especially, monuments to fallen martyrs are a staple of the landscape. On the Firemen's Monument, the sculpture group "Courage" depicts a woman holding the dying form of her husband in her arms. This uncompromising display of the face of tragedy does not detract from the park's pleasant ambiance, nor does the view of the monument as a sarcophagus from 100th Street make that street any less livable. | 21 |
| Bringing the sensibilities of children into their argument begs the question of what exactly is appropriate public viewing matter. Apparently, vigilant cannon with their eight-inch breeches aimed over the Hudson River toward New Jersey do constitute family-friendly matter. | 22 |
| The Soldiers and Sailors Monument, which these cannons guard, has become a recreation spot that demonstrates how well a public monument can complement the surrounding topography. Situated on the edge of the hillside that separates Lower and Upper Riverside Park, this tribute to New York's Civil War volunteers and the generals who led them creates an interesting junction of stairs and pathways between the park's two sections. Erected around the same time as Grant's Tomb, the Monument itself has been called a "typical reminder, in its hollow pomposity, of an army which had not been engaged in a major struggle since 1965...this monument symbolized the stolid wealth and prosperity of our country at the time of its building." 10 Glorifying warfare in a more obvious manner than any of the other Riverside works, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument falls well within the Art Commission's guidelines for public statuary. | 23 |
| The New York City Art Commission characterized acceptable park sculpture as upbeat, patriotic works having to do "with this country holding its own." 11 This claim does not accurately reflect the variety of themes represented in New York City parks. While Attilio Piccirilli was installing his tribute to the heroic dead of the Fire Department, he was also at work on his celebrated "Maine Monument" on the southwest corner of Central Park. While the latter monument evokes patriotic feelings ("Remember the Maine!"), it primarily commemorates the helpless victims of the ship's explosion, whose loss stirred tremendous grief as well as war fever. Even Grant's tomb is fashioned after the Tomb of King Mausolus at Halicarnasus, the manmade wonder from which the word "mausoleum" is derived. "I don't think the reasoning is sound," commented Dr. Emanuel Sherer of the Zygelboim Committee on the city's decision. "The entire park is full of such monuments connected with death and wars." 12 | 24 |
| New York City's monuments do not stand as cheering sections for past victories, but rather as reminders of the sacrifices made by our country and the rest of humanity when called upon to defend ourselves and our ideals. A memorial to the defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War would evoke not just a single place in time, but also the causes for which this global conflict was fought. Such reminders deserve to exist in a context removed from the distractions of the here and now, but not so remote as a corner of a museum. In the neighborhoods where people live, work and play, there should be a few reminders of those things we should never forget. | 25 |
| History needs markers to make sure it never becomes too confusing or too distant. When we look to history for lessons, monuments show us where to look. | 26 |
