Chirlane in Charge (Again): NYC’s Statue Shake-up
Just when we thought Mayor de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, could not possibly go any further overboard with damaging this city, he puts McCray in charge of a committee to evaluate whether to keep statues around the city (“Founding Father’s Day,” June 20).
One of the first statues potentially coming under her “evaluation” is that of Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
This never-ending effort to sanitize our past is going to hurt this city in the long run. Why can’t a citywide referendum be passed to run these two out of town once and for all or at the very least to block de Blasio from engaging in nepotism and effectively bolstering his wife’s possible running for Brooklyn borough president?
Robert Mruczek
Brooklyn
Putting aside the tackiness of de Blasio appointing his wife to head the commission to examine the pedigree of our statues, I think the whole project sounds like it was concocted by the Kremlin or Beijing or other places where tyrants alter history to suit their biases.
Surely, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the general who led the battles that won our independence can still be honored.
Should we demolish the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial? Rename the nation’s capital?
Equality is achieved by education, not by this kind of destruction. Jonathan Fox
Fort Lee, NJ
As I read the coverage on the ongoing destruc- tion of American statues, I fear for our republic.
First they came for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, then Thomas Jefferson and now George Washington. Oh, I almost forgot Christopher Columbus, too.
Where does this madness stop? Do we strip our currency of all those 18th- and 19th-century Americans who created and built this democratic republic?
We are all imperfect. None of us is the same person we were 10 years or 40 years ago. The same goes for our nation. We are better today and hopefully will be better tomorrow. Erasing everything we are won’t make us better going forward. Salvator Giarratani
Boston, Mass.
So according to the mayor, his unelected wife is going to be in charge of determining the future of city statues.
Isn’t she the same person who headed the She Built NY commission? As I recall, the decision as to which women were deserving of a statue was put to a vote, and New Yorkers overwhelmingly picked Mother Cabrini.
The mayor’s wife, for reasons yet to be explained, snubbed the re
sults of the vote and the works of this remarkable woman.
And now this incompetent, biased woman will head the committee that picks which statues stay and which go? Are you kidding? God help us. Joseph Paino
Manhattan
The move to eliminate the statue of Jefferson in City Hall is short-sighted and ignorant.
There is no doubt that Jefferson and many of the Founding Fathers, who built the foundation of this country, were flawed individuals and products of their time.
To hold these individuals to today’s principles and standards, 250 years later, is self-serving and narcissistic.
If we start only memorializing people who have contributed to society and been perfect in their lives, the number we could honor would quickly diminish to zero. Peter W. Kelly
Hazlet, NJ
Bumbling de Blasio has placed his equally bumbling wife McCray in yet another city post.
The same McCray who oversaw ThriveNYC, where untold millions disappeared with nary a trace, and who co-headed the controversial She Built NY statue commission now gets a chance to reprise those performances as head of a statuedestroying committee. She acts like a vice mayor.
Nobody voted McCray into office, and those who voted de Blasio in now feel like complete idiots. Richard Carhidi
Manhattan