Schuyler statue saga needlessly drags on
ALBANY — The fate of the deposed Philip Schuyler statue is not, by any stretch, one of the more important issues facing the city. But the saga does tell us something about the bureaucratic inertia emanating from Albany’s City Hall.
As many of you will know, Mayor Kathy Sheehan announced during the tumultuous summer of 2020 that the Schuyler statue would be removed from its perch in front of City Hall “as soon as possible.” The reason was Schuyler’s history as an enslaver and, Sheehan told us, the pain his presence was causing some city employees.
It was a bold call from the mayor, albeit a controversial one, and a reasonable person might have assumed “as soon as possible” meant the statue of the Revolutionary War hero would come down quickly, maybe within months. Eliminate the pain. Let the healing begin.
Instead, the statue of a swashbuckling, cape-wearing Schuyler sat unmolested for three years, until attention given to the impending anniversary prompted the embarrassed administration to act and take Schuyler down without public notice.
Yet even then, 36 months after the original announcement, there was still no plan for where Schuyler would end up — and there still isn’t.
Last week, Saratoga County Board of Supervisors Chairman Phil Barrett came to a meeting of the Albany Common Council to request that the statue, sitting unloved in an undisclosed warehouse, move northward. Barrett even said Saratoga County would pay to truck and install the monument.
“I think there’s a lot of intense feelings on both sides of the issue,” Barrett, who is also the Clifton Park supervisor, told me Monday. “But the bottom line is that Albany decided it doesn’t want the statue anymore, even though the Schuyler name is in many ways synonymous with Albany.”
Sheehan’s chief of staff, David Galin, didn’t respond directly to my questions by deadline but said last week that, contrary to Barrett’s claim, the Sheehan administration wants and intends to keep the statue. What’s more, a yet-to-be-created monuments commission will decide where to put the bronze general and how to contextualize his story.
On Monday, a few hours after I’d asked Galin about the commission, Sheehan announced via news release that she’s seeking applications from Albany residents willing to serve and said the commission “will create an opportunity for us to think differently about our history and think differently about the monuments that are here.”
A commission! Of course!
Politicians often turn to commissions when they want to offload difficult decisions, and this is the second time Sheehan, who is not running for re-election, has asked a commission to examine aspects of the Schuyler statue. She’s pulling this Band-aid off slowly, all but guaranteeing that the decision regarding its next home will be made by the next mayor.
Barrett characterized his offer as almost a favor. While no decision has been made about where to site the statue, he said, Saratoga County
is willing to spare Albany the continuing controversy by taking control of decisions about how to present Schuyler’s story, warts and all.
“We can’t teach history by canceling history,” Barrett said. “You can’t teach history by deciding what parts you like and don’t like. You have to present the full picture of history to the next generation.”
That’s obviously true, but I won’t pretend that figuring out how to present our complicated past is easy. While Schuyler was one of the region’s largest owners of enslaved people, he was also a New York lawmaker, a U.S. senator, a major Revolutionary War general and a member of the New York Manumission Society, an abolitionist group that encouraged voluntarily freeing the enslaved.
His life included contradictions and competing currents. Most do.
For what little it’s worth, I wrote in 2016 that Schuyler’s name should be removed from an Albany school, as it eventually was, and I was generally supportive,
albeit with significant misgivings, of Sheehan’s call to move the statue.
I couldn’t have imagined, though, that the debate would be dragging on nearly four years later,
that there would be so much foot-dragging, that Sheehan & Co. would be unable or unwilling to get this over and done. Inertia, indeed.
It’s worth remembering
that Sheehan initially bolstered her statue decision by noting that Schuyler’s circle in front of City Hall created a “very dangerous” scenario for pedestrians trying
to access the building.
Alas, four years later, the scenario is just as dangerous. Where the Philip Schuyler statue once stood, an ugly, bare circle of dirt remains.