GINSBURG TO BE HONORED WITH STATUE IN BROOKLYN
Commission will seek location, develop design for native’s memorial
There are still people who remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg not just as a Supreme Court justice and champion of women’s rights, but as a Brooklyn native who grew up in Flatbush, attended the Hebrew school at the East Midwood Jewish Center and graduated from James Madison High School in 1950
Now, nearly a month after her death, artists and city and state officials are seizing on ways to memorialize the Brooklyn roots that shaped her career.
On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he had appointed a special commission to oversee the creation of a statue somewhere in Brooklyn.
The governor had already announced that the state would erect a statue, but the commission will now seek a location, design and will iron out other details. There is no timetable on when the commission is first expected to meet, according to a spokeswoman for Cuomo.
A day before Cuomo announced the commission, officials at City Point, a residential and commercial development in Brooklyn, said a bronze statue of Ginsburg would be unveiled there on March 15, on what would have been her 88th birthday.
Last month, the city renamed the Brooklyn Municipal Building for Ginsburg. Mayor Bill de Blasio also said the city would start planning its own memorial, though his office said Thursday that there was no update on that initiative.
The state’s commission for the statue includes her daughter, Jane, two granddaughters, and friends and colleagues of the justice.
The news came as the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding conformation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite among conservatives, to succeed Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
The news of Ginsburg ’s death last month from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer hit New Yorkers particularly hard. In New York, hundreds of people gathered outside the courthouse in Foley Square in lower Manhattan, holding candles and singing. An artist altered a subway mosaic at 50th Street to read “RUth St.” Signs across Brooklyn urged neighbors to honor her legacy by voting.
Ginsburg was born in Flatbush as Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, the daughter of Jewish immigrants. She lived on the first f loor of a two-story house in the multiethnic Midwood neighborhood.
Her father owned small clothing stores. Her friends and family called her Kiki. She attended P.S. 238 and was the editor of the newspaper at James Madison High School.
She would attend Cornell University, where she studied government and met Martin Ginsburg, whom she married shortly after graduation.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to Harvard for law school but transferred to Columbia Law School after her husband got a job in New York. She was the first woman to become a tenured law professor at Columbia.
In 1993, she became the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.