Columbus bronze defaced as statues debate rages on

Vandalism of explorer’s monument in Central Park again highlights how US should mark its history

VANDALS have defaced a statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park, covering the bronze’s hands in red paint and scrawling on the plinth: “Something’s coming”.

Columbus’s statue in New York is now at the centre of a debate over the appropriate way to mark the country’s history after protests last month, which centred around the fate of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, led to a death in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, said that the city would review its own monuments to assess whether they were appropriate, while President Donald Trump in turn asked whether removing Confederate monuments would lead to the eventual hiding of statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers, such as George Washington.

The 125-year-old Columbus statue in Central Park was yesterday covered in a cloth as park employees scrubbed it clean. The explorer has been blamed for torturing and ordering the murder of indigenous people while he was the governor of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and for causing the eventual expulsion of Native Americans from their land.

Maurice Darrell, 32, a Central Park drummer who goes by the name of Showtime B Hood, said he gave police leads. He explained that he had a confrontation with a rival musician who said on Saturday he was going to vandalise the statue as revenge for being removed from the park.

“Trust me I know, because he said he was going to do it on Saturday,” said Mr Darrell. “I didn’t believe it.”

On Friday, Mr de Blasio announced the members of a commission to recommend what to do about statues and other monuments in New York City that he has called “symbols of hate”. But in doing so, the mayor seemed to backtrack from his initial vow: instead of conducting a full review of hateful iconography, the commission has 90 days to “develop guidelines on how the city should address monuments [which are] seen as oppressive and inconsistent with the values of New York City,” according to a news release.

Mr de Blasio’s spokesman condemned Tuesday’s attack on the statue. “The mayor thinks vandalism is wrong and never the right approach to these conversations or monuments,” a spokesman said. A spokeswoman for Melissa Mark-viverito, the city council speaker, who first raised the issue of Columbus’s statue, said defacing the bronze was “unacceptable”.

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state, whose grandparents emigrated to the US from Italy, said that “the statues of Columbus are symbols to honour the Italian American heritage and their contribution to New York.” He added: “Part of that heritage is to stand against discrimination and honour the diversity in New York.”