Cleaning Tecumseh

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary, New York City

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Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, 7:15 am

I was in the city bright and early this morning running to a dentist appointment when, crossing 59th Street toward 5th Avenue, I noticed that the Sherman statue was covered for renovation. I blogged about the area back in 2011. I had not been in the neighborhood for a while and this was the first I had seen or heard of the project. My first thought when I saw the fencing and signage was, The Central Park Conservancy manages the plaza, along with its Saint-Gaudens masterwork? Then again, why should I be surprised? A quick internet search reveals this New York Times article with the full story from mid-June. The short version is that the pigeons were winning the battle of attrition versus General Sherman. Apparently previous restoration efforts did not go to well; guilding applied in 1989 was too bright, giving the artwork an unnatural hue which angered and upset many in the neighborhood. I have no fears for this current project and am sure the end result will be fine. Keeping the pigeons away permanently is another story.

I am not counting on it but I would love to see a more concerted effort to preserve Civil War New York and see it presented to the public in a more conscious way.

Headstones project reaches brick wall

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary

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One of the new headstones at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

A strange story came to my attention today via the New York Daily News. Regular followers of the blog know how much Brooklyn’s Green-Wood’s Cemetery means to me, so much so that my wife knows to lay me there to rest when it’s time for my just reward. Green-Wood has many natural, historical, and cultural charms. Like all cemeteries–as opposed to graveyards–it is, paradoxically, a living place. One of the signs of life over the last decade has been the hundreds of Civil War headstones that have gone up in that time. The process takes place with volunteers, working with the cemetery historian, going through old military, pension, and burial records to ascertain the soldiers now resting there. It seems the Department of Veterans Affairs has instituted a rule change that only family can request headstones for loved ones. Needless to say, this will put a damper on the project; demographic changes over the last century and a half have taken many Brooklynites away from the borough. It is difficult to believe many will come forward to identify an ancestor who wore the Grey or Blue. Yes, there are a handful of Confederates buries in Green-Wood.

I really do not know a whole lot about the situation at the moment. My guess is that it is a budget thing. I know the VA has been very busy the past decade and more. Iraq. Afghanistan. Aging WW2 and now Korean and Vietnam vets. The agency has had its hands full. Still, it would seem a shame if this project, not just in Green-Wood but at similar places across the country, were to end. If anyone know more about this please feel free to enlighten us.

Monday evening winding down

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.

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I just got back from DC. The Hayfoot and I had a good time. Being in the nation’s capitol on Memorial Day Weekend is always special. It was a great beginning to the summer. For starters, I have made it my goal to dedicate Memorial through Labor Day to reading novels and short stories, fiction being something I have gotten away from in recent years. To that end, I kicked off by reading John Williams’s 1965 Stoner on the bus ride up ad down. It is sort of The Death of Ivan Ilych if the protagonist were a frustrated academic living in Middle America in the early to mid twentieth century. I think this fiction thing is going to work out well; there is a lot of literature, in different genres, I wasn’t ready for as a younger person that I think will speak to me now.

I also got an interesting email from my sister on Saturday. She received a phone call out of the blue from a woman who is distantly related to us. I began my genealogy in earnest about a year ago and have become something of the de facto family historian. My sister gave me the woman’s contact information and I intend to call her now that I am back in town.

As I mentioned the other day, we planned to visit the Old Soldiers Home/Lincoln Cottage on Saturday. We did, and had a great time. The wife surprised me by arranging a visit to Manassas on Sunday with some friends of ours. I had never visited Bull Run before. It was a special day.

Here, quickly, are a few pics from the weekend.

Abe and the Hayfoot, Lincoln Cottage

President and Mrs. Lincoln spent more than a quarter of their time at the Old Soldiers Home. The Home, the grounds of which include the presidential cottage, lies about 3 1/2 miles north of the White House. Here Lincoln was able to get away somewhat from the city’s oppressive heat and endless stream of supplicants asking for favors.

There was little respite, however. In a painful reminder of the war’s human cost, this cemetery was within sight of the cottage. From the window of his study Lincoln could see the graves adding up.

Manassas

This monument atop Henry Hill was dedicated in June 1865 and was one of the very first constructed.

A living history unit representing the 14th Brooklyn was in attendance.

The 14th was one of many New York zouave units at both First and Second Manassas. In July 2011 I blogged about the rededication of the New York monuments at Bull Run during the Centennial fifty years ago. It meant a lot to finally see them in person.

Bull Run Creek

Overall it was some weekend. Thank you honey, and to everyone else who made it happen.

A Beautiful Way to Go

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, Museums, New York City

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Four years ago, just prior to getting married, I moved from an apartment I had lived in for twelve years to another about five blocks away. Overall, the move wasn’t much: same grocery store, post office, dry cleaner, etc, etc. The big change (other than the marriage) was that I was no longer so close to Prospect Park. An extra twenty minutes each way may not seem like much, but it adds an almost-prohibitive amount of time to a potential weekend walk or evening stroll after work. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and, though not as well-maintained, is very much the equal of their earlier Central Park. (Central Park is better maintained because the rich folks who live along its perimeter give piles of private money for its maintenance.) For me it was a big loss, though one that came with an equally big win: I am now just five minutes away from the gates of Green-Wood Cemetery. Green-Wood is one of the original garden cemeteries and is currently celebrating its 175th anniversary. To mark the occasion the Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit titled A Beautiful Way to Go: New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery. It opened yesterday and runs through October 13.

Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

Garden cemeteries, sometimes called rural cemeteries, were a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when American and European societies were industrializing rapidly and green space was becoming scarcer and scarcer for city dwellers. It may surprise you to know that in the late nineteenth century Green-Wood was the most-visited place in New York State after Niagara Falls. Graveyards are for the dead, final resting places for those who came before us and have now passed on; cemeteries are for the living, places to commune with nature and the past. One hundred and seventy-five years later Green-Wood is still serving this function. No matter how many times I have been there–and it is in the hundreds by now–I always see something new on each visit. It is not hard to do, whether it’s reading the many freshly-planted headstones of the 4,000 Civil War soldiers buried there, poking my head into the bars of a mausoleum to peek at the Tiffany windows, or seeing the sun hitting a familiar vista at a different angle during the change of seasons. I am looking forward to catching this show in the coming weeks, and will have more to say about it here on the blog after I do.

Sunday morning coffee

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary

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The Scottish – American Soldiers Monument, Edinburgh

An interesting vignette came to my in-box yesterday about the George E. Bissell statue of Lincoln that stands in Edinburgh’s Old Calton Cemetery. Bissell’s name does not carry the same weight as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, or Paul Manship, which is unfortunate because the sculptor was very much their equal. Bissell created one of my favorite statues in all of New York City, the monument to Chester Arthur that stands in Madison Square Park. Bissell’s Arthur stands adjacent to the more lauded Saint-Gaudens’s tribute to Admiral Farragut. Sadly, both are off the tourist path and stand equally unnoticed by New Yorkers themselves as they go about their daily routines.

Bissell’s Lincoln was dedicated in 1893 and was the first of many Lincolns erected outside of the United States during the era. As you can see, it fits neatly into the “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” motif described by Kirk Savage in his book of the same title. We have our own such statue, for Henry Ward Beecher, here in downtown Brooklyn. Bissell’s Lincoln is more than a tribute to the Great Emancipator, however; it was also built to pay honor to the Scots who fought for the Union. If you look closely, you will notice that it stands next to the tomb of philosopher David Hume, which could not have been coincidental. We are clearly meant to associate the two men and to think of them as equals. In the tradition of the time turnout was significant for the dedication, so much so that tickets were required despite the blustery conditions. It is lost on us today how seriously people of the period took these kinds of things. Bissell’s Lincoln is a good reminder, too, that the world was paying attention to the events in the United States during our Civil War.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Easter morning coffee

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Union League Club

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Happy Easter. I am sitting in the living room with my coffee and Kind of Blue is on the turntable. The windows open to the early spring warmth.

I was having a brief back-and-forth online the other day with someone about Grant’s Tomb. Specifically, we were talking about how far the monument had fallen during New York City’s lost years in the 1970s and 1980s. This excellent piece in yesterday’s Wall Street by Dennis Montagna of the Park Service about the Grant Memorial on the grounds of the national capitol got me thinking even harder about various Grant statues and monuments I have seen over the years. Built from roughly 1885-1922, the monuments initially reflected the nation’s sentiments for the man many put in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. After the horrors of the First World War the Grant the Butcher meme took hold and his standing went down precipitously in the coming decades. To visit Grant Cottage in Upstate New York one must enter the grounds of a medium security prison. People walk past the beautiful Grant statue in Brooklyn, across the street from what was the Union Cub, everyday without think twice about it. When I visited two years ago a woman who worked in the adjacent building said they always wondered who it was, which struck me as odd because his name in on the pedestal. Oh well.

In a sense these things are inevitable. It is not even just Grant. I have seen beautiful statues of Lincoln in places like Newark and Jersey City that are visited by no one except the homeless who now inhabit those areas. Time moves on. Demographics change. Once thriving industrial areas that could afford a statue in, say, 1913 have better thing to worry about a hundred years later. The recent immigrants of Flatbush–and it is the immigrants who have revitalized Brooklyn in the past 25-30 years–are concerned with educating there kids and moving on to bigger and better things, not the particulars of the old statuary in their neighborhood.

The major ones deserve are our attention, though. Great things have been done to revitalize the vicinity around Grant’s Tomb in Upper Manhattan. Hopefully, strides will be taken with the Grant Memorial on the capitol grounds. It would be great if they got rid of the ugly reflecting pool for starters. The Grant bicentennial (1822-2022) is just nine short years away.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Quote of the day

24 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary, Quote of the day

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In the evenings when Washington was quiet, I would often go to the Lincoln Memorial and talk to Mr. Lincoln. In those days you could drive right up and park at the foot of the steps of the memorial . . . I loved that majestic seated figure surrounded by his eloquent words. I found him to be a wonderful listener.

–Cynthia Helms, An Intriguing Life: A Memoir of War, Washington, and Marriage to an American Spymaster

Presidents Day weekend

16 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Monuments and Statuary, Museums, New York City

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I am on the Boltbus to DC. We just crossed under the Hudson into New Jersey.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day in which we were talking about the things that are uniquely of the 21st century. Hard as it is to believe, but we are now more than a full decade into the new millennium. The people of the 20th century saw the introduction of radio, television, and the personal computer. But what is new and unique so far to the 21st century? A few things we came up with were the eReader, the iPad and other tablet devices, and for those who live in the Northeast Corridor, the Boltbus. It has become such a part of the fabric of life in this region. I firmly believe that some filmmaker a half century from now will create a nostalgic scene in which two young lovers, circa 2010, head off for a weekend alone in the big city by taking this cheap and thoroughly enjoyable mass transit. Don’t laugh. Woody Allen did something similar in his depictions of, say, the Automat in Radio Days.

This weekend I am hoping to see the Civil War exhibit at the Library of Congress. Also on the list is the Civil War and American Art show at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. This will actually be at the Met later this year, but there is going to be so much to it that I want to see it more than once; viewing art can be exhausting and emotionally draining. Speaking of the Met, this is a Holiday Monday coming up. Winter is a great time to visit, especially with the Matisse show set to run for one more month.

I have blogged about the Met’s New American Wing before. Here is a short video that PBS Channel Thirteen released this week about the works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Metropolitan Museum. It is really something to live in New York and walk past these sculptures every day when going about your business. Yesterday morning I paused briefly in front of Saint-Gaudens’s statue of General Sherman while I was on my way to the dentist. No matter how long I live here, I will aways be a tourist. I love the still photograph in the video of what I assume was the dedication ceremony. It is lost on us today that people turned out by the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for such occasions. Pretty wild.

Enjoy the video and your weekend.

The Eisenhower Memorial saga continues

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Monuments and Statuary

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I hope the powers-that-be eventually reach the conclusion that the current proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall is the wrong one, historically, aesthetically, and even technically. It is difficult to imagine the Gehry design withstanding decades of humid District of Columbia summers and windy, cold winters. There have been structural problems with other Gehry projects. On Tuesday the National Capital Planning Commission issued its newest technical report for the proposed monument. Time will tell.

The Eisenhower Memorial, to be continued in 2013

23 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Monuments and Statuary, Washington, D.C.

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The demands of work prevented me from commenting the week before last that the National Capital Planning Commission has decided to table any decision on the Eisenhower Memorial until sometime in 2013. I am taking that as a hopeful sign that the powers-that-be will reconsider (i.e. rescind) the plans of starchitect Frank Gehry for his monument to the general and president. In mid-November John S.D. Eisenhower, the 90 year old son of the 34th president and former general and ambassador in his own right, wrote a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye, vice chair of the memorial commission. Media outlets tended to publish only excerpts, His daughter Susan has just published the entire piece. It is worth checking out.

The Strawfoot

~ a New Yorker's American History blog

Category Archives: Monuments and Statuary