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Thursday, August 27, 2015

Postcard Thursday: Civic Virtue


Back in 2011, we wrote a blog post pondering the fate of Frederick MacMonnies's sculpture "Civic Virtue," which is the subject of today's postcard. For once, the story has a happy ending.

Frederick MacMonnies (1863-1937) is best remembered today for his statue of Nathan Hale that still stands in City Hall Park,* but at the end of his own lifetime, he was better known for the controversy surrounding "Civic Virtue," which essentially ruined his public career.

The statue’s story begins in 1894 with the death of Angelina Crane, an eccentric, rich widow who lived in the Hotel Brunswick on Madison Square. In her will, Mrs. Crane left $5 to her daughter (who had treated her in “a most undutiful and unnatural manner”), a few thousand dollars to a handful of charities, and the bulk of the money—upward of $50,000—to the City of New York to erect a drinking fountain in her honor.

After a round of lawsuits, in which Mrs. Crane’s daughter was unable to prove that her mother was insane, the city began the process of creating a statue to fulfill Mrs. Crane’s bequest. In 1909, Mayor George “Max” McClellan hand-picked MacMonnies to create the sculpture. (MacMonnies had recently completed a statue of the mayor’s father, Civil War General George B. McClellan, in Washington, DC.) It took MacMonnies five years to create the preliminary designs, which were for a massive work, 57-feet tall, which depicted Virtue (a large male figure) vanquishing Vice (a supine female). The Parks Commissioner and the city’s Art Commission hemmed and hawed over the piece: it was too big; it didn’t take advantage of its proposed location in City Hall Park; it was too architectural for MacMonnies to execute properly. The city told MacMonnies to go back to the drawing board and convinced him to allow architect Thomas Hastings to help him with the new plan. Somewhere along the way, the idea that this be a "drinking fountain" (as stipulated in Angelina Crane's bequest) seems to have been dropped.

In 1919, MacMonnies’s revised (and much smaller) "Civic Virtue" was approved and the finished work was unveiled in 1922. In the new work, MacMonnies continued to represent Virtue as a club-wielding man, while Vice was now depicted as two female women being trampled beneath Virtue’s feet. New Yorkers were immediately up in arms. Virtue was instantly nicknamed “The Rough Guy” in the press and women complained that MacMonnies was unfairly vilifying their sex. The statue stirred up so much public debate that the city held a public hearing on its propriety. At the hearing, Elizabeth King Black of the National Women’s Party declared: “Men have their feet on women's necks, and the sooner women realize it the better!” Popular Mechanics reported the reactions of passersby: "It ain't art to have a guy stepping on a girl's neck that way"; "Huh, those women represent vice
the man doesn't. That's why the women are kicking about it."

MacMonnies didn't help himself by wading into the fray. "God Almighty made men strong and women beautiful," he told the New York Times. "The female form is used to suggest grace and beauty, being combined with the form of the sea-monster to to suggest treachery and guile....when we wish to symbolize something tempting we use the woman's form." MacMonnies also chided people for misreading the statue, pointing out that Virtue's feet stood on two rocks
not on the two womenand that if women didn't understand their own anatomy that wasn't really his fault.

Despite the bad press and poor public reception, there were no immediate plans to do anything about MacMonnies's work. However, by the early 1930s, the city’s newly elected mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and his Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, had began to publicly discuss moving the piece. In 1941, the statue was removed from its original basin (which was destroyed) and relocated to a spot near Queens Borough Hall. 

In 2012, a secret (or, maybe, not-so-secret) plan was hatched to move the deteriorating statue from Queens to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where it arrived at the end of that year. The statue can now be seen at the intersection of Jasmine and Garland Avenues in Section C of the cemetery.

* The Nathan Hale statue was put in the park to commemorate the spot where he supposedly regretted having but one life to give for his country. Historians now agree that Hale was hanged elsewhere.


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Read our full chapter on Edgar Allan Poe in NYC in

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
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Thursday, August 20, 2015

Postcard Thursday: The Lost Brennan Farmhouse where Poe Wrote "The Raven"


Edgar Allan Poe didn't live in New York City all that long, but he left an indelible stamp on the city. Of all the places he lived, only one still survives, Poe Cottage in the Bronx (subject of an earlier edition of Postcard Thursday). But today's postcard, which we acquired recently, depicts what is considered by many to be Poe's most important NYC residence -- the place where he wrote "The Raven."

As we write in Footprints in New York:
As [Poe's wife] Virginia’s tuberculosis worsened in 1844, the Poes took the only advice most doctors could give: move out of the city and get her into cleaner air.... [T]hey rented rooms from Patrick and Mary Brennan in “an old-fashioned, double-framed” farmhouse on the west side on what would eventually be 84th Street. The house was surrounded by 216 acres of woods. According to one of Poe’s earliest biographers, the family “received no visitors, and took their meals in their room by themselves.” Mrs. Brennan recalled Poe as a “shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree near the banks of the Hudson River.” In Poe’s era, Riverside Park had not been created, and the waterfront was not yet developed this far north. This meant Poe probably didn’t actually scramble all the way down the Hudson’s banks for his reveries; he watched the river drift by from the top of [a nearby outcropping of rock known as] Mount Tom.
courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

The Poes’ room—unaltered until the house was torn down in 1888— was small but filled with light, having windows that faced the river on one side and the Brennans’ forest on the other. Years later, people who knew the house recollected that the Poes’ room was exactly like the chamber in “The Raven,” complete with the “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. This may have been wishful thinking, but the house does seem, from photos and drawings, to have been a pleasant place. Pleasant enough, in retrospect, to make one almost forget the Poes’ straitened circumstances. Poe had difficulty making the rent. For much of his marriage, he had trouble putting food on the table. When Poe won a $225 judgment in a libel lawsuit, he used the money to buy some furnishings and a new suit; he could never afford to own more than one suit at a time, and the previous one was probably beyond repair.
Most inconveniently, the Brennan house’s distance from the city may have provided fresh air, but it also meant that any time Poe needed to meet with a publisher, he either had to take a stagecoach down the Bloomingdale Road—a costly inconvenience—or walk the ten miles round-trip.

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If don't follow us on Facebook (hint, hint), you might not have seen that James had an op-ed piece again this week in The Guardian, this one looking at the role Millard Fillmore played in the 1856 presidential election and whether Donald Trump will do the same in 2016. You can read it here.

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James was also interviewed by George Bodarky for WFUV's Cityscape about the origin of New York City private clubs. If you are in NYC, you can hear the interview when it is broadcast this Saturday, August 22, at 7:30 a.m. on 90.7FM. Those of you who are in other parts of the country can stream it or download the podcast at www.wfuv.org/cityscape



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Read our full chapter on Edgar Allan Poe in NYC in

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
you can order it from your favorite online retailers (AmazonBarnes and Nobleetc.) or



Thursday, August 13, 2015

Postcard Thursday: Apollo 11






Today marks the 46th anniversary of the massive ticker tape parade held for the Apollo 11 astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. At the time, many claimed it was the largest ticker tape parade New York had ever seen, but as we were researching Inside the Apple, we found that same claim was made for many parades and it’s almost impossible to verify. (Four million people were said to have attended the Apollo parade—an impressive number, even if it’s not the largest.)

Certainly, it was the longest parade. The city’s traditional parade route runs from Bowling Green Park at the foot of Broadway to City Hall. The Apollo astronauts, however, after receiving the key to the city, continued up Broadway to Herald Square and then on to Times Square. As the New York Times noted, the confetti in Midtown was “made up more of paper towels and pages from telephone directories than tickertape” and that it grew “so dense that the astronauts could hardly see.”

As we write in Inside the Apple:
It was also one of the fastest ticker tape parades. The astronauts started at Bowling Green at 10:17 a.m. (about half an hour ahead of schedule) and arrived on the steps of City Hall just fourteen minutes later! Many people who showed up for the parade were disappointed to discover that the astronauts had already passed them by…. By 1:15 p.m. the astronauts were back at Kennedy airport to go to Chicago. They ended the day with festivities in Los Angeles. Having just been to the moon and back, a quick one-day jaunt across North America must not have seemed like such a big deal.
 


As Buzz Aldrin has been tweeting recently, the astronauts had to go through customs upon their return--follow this link to see the astronauts declaration form ("Departure from: MOON. Arrival at: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA").


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Explore more NYC history in

If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
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Thursday, August 6, 2015

Postcard Thursday: William Tecumseh Sherman


At the entrance to Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street sits a small landscaped area known as Grand Army Plaza (which, among other things, lent its name to the Plaza Hotel). The square is named for the Grand Army of the Republic (aka the Union army) and features a statue of one of that army's biggest heroes: William Tecumseh Sherman.

As we write in Inside the Apple:
William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in New York City in 1886 to reenter civilian life after retiring from the army. (He served as commander of the army until 1883. In 1884, the Republican Party tried to convince him to run for President, to which he famously replied: “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”) 
In February 1891, Sherman died in New York and immediately the Chamber of Commerce began fundraising for an equestrian statue to honor the city’s adopted son. The chamber’s members were the mercantile elite and in many ways they were the people who had most benefited from Sherman’s famed March to the Sea. By utterly subduing the south through a campaign of total war, Sherman had guaranteed that northern industrialists, merchants, and bankers would reap the benefits of the post-bellum economy. 
The commission went to Augustus Saint-Gaudens [who] created a monumental figure of the general astride his horse; he positioned the horse’s rear hooves so they would trample over Georgia pine. The horse and its rider are led forward by an allegorical figure of Victory. (Saint-Gaudens, often harshly critical of his own work, was pleased with the results. He later wrote: “It’s the greatest ‘Victory’ anybody ever made. Hooraah!”) Because Saint-Gaudens disliked the ugly, industrial patina of most metal sculpture, he gilded the general in two layers of gold leaf; when it was erected, it was the only gilded statue in the entire city.... The statue was unveiled on Decoration Day 1903, with prominent national and local dignitaries in attendance. There is an oft-repeated (and certainly apocryphal) tale that one southern woman in the audience, seeing Sherman on his horse and Victory leading him forward, remarked: “Well, isn’t that just like a Yankee to make the woman walk!”
Sherman remains a highly controversial figure, particularly in the states of the former Confederacy. Speaking of controversy: James wrote an Op-Ed piece for The Guardian about the watering down of the AP US History curriculum, which you can read--and, if so inclined, wade into the fray of the 430+ comments.


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If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Footprints yet,
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