Imagining a new Columbus Circle
This month marks the 125th anniversary of the dedication of the now controversial statue at Columbus Circle commissioned by ItalianAmerican New Yorkers in 1892. Our view of Christopher Columbus has changed a great deal since then — and it’s time the monument changed, too. No, we shouldn’t tear it down. But we can and must modernize it to make it more genuinely compatible with the values of 21st century America.
We owe our city and nation a new Columbus Circle not because we have uncovered new facts — his brutal conquest and enslavement of the Taino people was welldocumented and publicly condemned in his lifetime — but because world-changing events in the 20th century have given us a necessary new perspective on the explorer and his legacy.
The world wars gave birth to the modern human rights movement. Battles over civil rights and immigration gave rise to multiculturalism. Both sides in today’s debate over whether to preserve or tear down his statue agree on the facts about Columbus; the conflict is over opposing perspectives.
Mayor de Blasio has empaneled a diverse commission of experts to explore these issues with regard to the Columbus statute and other monuments. If the commission takes the mayor’s lead, it’s likely they will support supplementing the pedestal that celebrates Columbus’ explorations with a plaque listing his crimes.
That is not enough. Now more than ever, we need a new Columbus Circle that forces us to reflect on power, greed, discrimination and exploitation and teaches essential lessons of history to New Yorkers and visitors from all over the world for generations to come. I have proposed a plan to do exactly this — transforming the plaza around the Columbus statue to offer multiple perspectives that tell a fuller, more complete story of the man and his legacy: the good, the bad and the ugly.
If we were to embrace this vision, we could not only recalibrate our treatment of this complex and important historical figure. We could set an elevated new standard for the way our monuments handle the people who shaped the past.
The circular plaza around the statue is presently divided by the pedestrian entrances into three plazas. Each of the three plazas should contain educational panels dedicated to one of three aspects of the story of Columbus and his legacy: conquest, slavery and immigration.
Instead of hustling past the statue on the way to Central Park, visitors would take a historical journey around the monument. With Columbus in view above, they would encounter educational reliefs that tell the stories of the Native peoples, African slaves and Italian immigrants who contributed to building the Americas.
In the section of the plaza dedicated to conquest, visitors will learn that Columbus slaughtered and enslaved Native peoples on several Caribbean islands. He created a tribute system that forced every Taino to work in mines and bring him a certain amount of gold.
If they didn’t fill their quota, soldiers cut off their hands and tied them around their necks to send a message to others. If slaves tried to escape, Columbus had them burned alive or ripped apart by attack dogs.
Which brings us to the second section. We think of Columbus as an explorer, but he made his fortune as a slave trader who supervised the selling of native girls as young as 9 into sexual slavery.
When European diseases wiped out the native population, Columbus found a new source of slaves: Africa.
These are inconvenient truths we too often refuse to face: America was built not just on high hopes and ideals, but on greed and brutality, too.
The final section of a reimagined Columbus Circle should focus on the tremendous contributions of Italian-Americans. The 19th-century Italian immigrants and their children who built the monument to Christopher Columbus did not know these monstrous aspects of the Columbus story. They were celebrating Columbus the Explorer, not the conquistador and slave trader.
At the same time, the immigrants were victims of discrimination from a majority population, who saw them as foreign and un-American. To counter this prejudice, they pooled their spare nickels and dimes to honor someone from their homeland who would serve as an enduring symbol of the essential role Italians played in our nation’s founding and development.
Defenders of the Columbus statute are absolutely right that to tear it down would disrespect the memory and struggle of those who funded it and contributed so much to building our city and country.
And so, that third slice of the plaza must make explicitly clear the original intention of the immigrants who built it — and celebrate the Italian-American experience.
Standing within eyeshot of the Trump International Hotel, this will serve as a constant reminder that immigrants have always made America great. That greatness will be enhanced by a Columbus Circle that confronts hard truths and honestly tells the story of how America was created.