PROBE IS A MONUMENTAL BUST
City to move just 1 statue, add info for Columbus & Teddy
The divisive debate ignited by Mayor de Blasio over whether to remove controversial monuments ended with a whimper Thursday when officials announced that just one statue would be moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The 18-member panel, whose convening by de Blasio led to protests and vandalism over historical figures, ended up focusing on just four public monuments — with controversial 1800s gynecologist Dr. J. Marion Sims being the lone figure to get the boot.
His Central Park monument will be moved to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is buried. Sims is credited as the father of modern gynecology, but he experimented on enslaved black women.
Tributes to Christopher Columbus, French Nazi collaborator Henri Phil- ippe Petain and Theodore Roosevelt were also eyed for removal, but all three will stay, with clarifying historical information to be added.
The Parks Department and other agencies that oversee the monuments and markers will tasked with writing the added information, officials said.
While a number of panelists recommended tossing the 15th-century explorer from his perch in Columbus Circle over his ties to genocide and the slave trade, it was Roosevelt who came closer to getting yanked, with half of the members wanting his statue gone from outside the American Museum of Natural History.
Those members cited the statue’s subservient depiction of an AfricanAmerican man and a Native-American man and its connection to eugenics, but with the vote split, the panel left it up to Mayor de Blasio, who granted Teddy a reprieve.
The Columbus statue, whose po- tential removal stirred up outrage in the Italian-American community, will be joined by a large-scale monument to indigenous peoples, potentially in nearby Central Park, officials said.
“Reckoning with our collective histories is a complicated undertaking with no easy solution. Our approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to — instead of removing entirely — the representations of these histories,” de Blasio said.
“And we’ll be taking a hard look at who has been left out and seeing where we can add new work to ensure our public spaces reflect the diversity and values of our great city.”
De Blasio launched the initiative in mid-August while responding to the violence surrounding protests over the removal of a Confederate statute in Charlottesville, Va. He tweeted that he would form a commission and that Petain’s marker — a nameplate on the sidewalk along Broadway’s
Canyon of Heroes — “will be one of the first we remove.”
He later claimed the tweet was botched by his staff and didn’t reflect his stance.
On Thursday, the commission ruled that 206 markers in the Canyon of Heroes, including Petain’s, should remain.
“The commission believes that if a marker is accurate and not celebratory of egregious values or actions, it should not be removed,” the panel said in a 42page report.
The mayor did not embrace the panel’s recommendation that references to the name Canyon of Heroes be scrubbed.
For Harry Belafonte, the panel’s highest-profile member, it took only one meeting to decide the enterprise wasn’t worth his time. The singer and civil-rights icon, a supporter of the mayor, de- scribed the meeting he attended as “superficial” but declined to detail what was discussed.
“I did not participate in it much,” he told The Post. “There were a lot of things I could have suggested and done, but none of it would have been worth the time to go through it all.”
Member Harriet Senie, an arthistory director at the City College of New York, conceded “not much has changed” after the panel met three times, held five town-hall meetings attended by 500 people and surveyed 3,000 people.
“It was very, very challenging, but it was probably done as well as it could be,” said Senie, who blamed the lack of action on the divergent opinions held by members of the commission.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn blasted the decision to preserve Petain’s marker.
“It is immoral to publicly display the names of Nazis,” said Hikind, who is Jewish. “We have a moral obligation to educate the public, and especially young people, by removing markers that commemorate individuals who willingly participated in the systematic murder of innocent men, women and children.”
The panel made recommendations on how to choose historical figures to honor and how to decide which statues should be reviewed for removal.
It suggested that a work of public art should be reviewed if it has faced two years of public outcry, opposition from a local community board or if damning information emerges about who or what the work honors.
City officials said the initiative came at no cost to taxpayers.