ART BYPASS
Columbus statue stays, but to get critical marker
CHRISTOPHER Columbus stays — with an asterisk.
The findings of Mayor de Blasio’s monuments commission were set in stone Thursday — with the group deciding after months of deliberations not to completely tear down any statues around the city in a monumentally anticlimactic ruling.
Columbus will remain atop his perch high above the circle named for him on the Upper West Side — but the city will put up new historical markers in and around Columbus Circle to “continue the public discourse” — and will put up, at city expense, a new monument honoring indigenous people.
“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.
Columbus was the highestprofile person on the chopping block after Hizzoner promised to rid the city of “symbols of hate” in the wake of the fall of Confederate monuments in the South. He soon found himself mired in controversy surrounding characters like Columbus, viewed by some Italian-Americans as a hero and by some indigenous people as a bringer of genocide and colonialism.
While Columbus got a reprieve, the city will relocate a statue of J. Marion Sims — who invented gynecological surgery techniques while experimenting on enslaved black women who could not consent to surgery — from its spot in Central Park to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried.
Two other controversial monuments will remain in their current places — including a marker commemorating a parade thrown in the Canyon of Heroes for Philippe Petain, who would later become a hated Nazi collaborator as the head of Vichy France. The city may add historical signs along the canyon. Theodore Roosevelt, meanwhile, will continue to keep watch outside the American Museum of Natural History — despite criticisms that the Native Americans beside him are depicted as caricatures. Yet again, the city promised to add context. The Columbus decision was welcome news to Joe Guagliardo, president of the National Council of Columbia Associations. “As far as we’re concerned, this is a victory,” he told the Daily News. “I don’t care about markers.” But Betty Lyons, head of the American Indian law Alliance and an Onondaga citizen, said the addition of the plaques is “not enough.”
“We are disappointed but not surprised. This is our reality, the same old act of erasure,” she said.
De Blasio also drew criticism from Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), who said it was “immoral” to keep the markers for Petain and fellow traitorous World War II French politician Pierre Laval.
The committee was tasked with a 90-day review, and it held three formal in-person meetings and one public hearing in each of the five boroughs, de Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips said. With the completion of the report, the group has now been disbanded.