Photo of the Day: Horace Greeley Monument, City Hall Park, NYC

I’m not sure what I expected as I walked briskly through City Hall Park one afternoon last week, but it wasn’t this monument to an influential businessman and media magnate who never served in the Big Apple’s government.

With that said, though not be as well remembered today as he might have wished, Horace Greeley was a person of consequence in 19^th century America, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone passing through this area of Lower Manhattan to learn at least a bit more about him. This outdoor sculpture is as good a place as any to start.

In the New York area, the only press lords besides Greeley with designs on the Presidency were William Randolph Hearst (who never made it higher than Congress) and Michael Bloomberg (whose 2020 Democratic primary campaign failed dismally, despite $60 million of his own fortune).

Greeley, at least, filled an expiring Congressional term before being nominated in 1872 by both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. He lost that fall to Ulysses Grant—then, only a few weeks later, died, worn out in body and mind by the race, the recent death of his wife, and a bruising, losing struggle to keep his paper, the New York Tribune, out of the hands of a business rival.

Well before that, Greeley had made his mark as a tireless editorial voice for westward expansionism, free homesteading, the rights of labor, agricultural improvement, high tariffs, the beneficial impact of immigration, and most important, abolitionism.

His influence was so considerable that in 1862, after his open public letter to Abraham Lincoln advocating the confiscation of slaves held by Confederates, the President felt compelled to make one of his most famous explanations about the connection between freeing the slaves and preserving the Union.

For all his high-mindedness, Greeley earned a parallel reputation as an eccentric. His public advocacy for causes such as vegetarianism, spiritualism, and utopian socialism were considered especially fringe for his time.

Moreover, what people encountered when meeting him in person—his oversized, floppy hat covering unkempt white hair, a threadbare white coat, and a high-pitched voice that could erupt irritably—led cartoonist Thomas Nast to caricature him, repeatedly and unforgettably. (See this May 2008 blog post from the National Portrait Gallery on how Greeley was depicted.)

You’ll see little of that in the far more respectful monument in City Hall Park, created by John Quincy Adams Ward, one of the foremost sculptors of the day. The artist, Greeley’s daughter Gabrielle recalled, “spent hours studying my father as he worked in his office [and] after his death took a mask of his face." 

The statue shows Greeley sitting in a Victorian easy chair, with a copy of the Tribune spread out loosely over his knee—not just scrutinizing it for appearance or content, but perhaps contemplating how he could keep it from descending into the sensationalist abyss occupied by competitor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald.

When the monument was unveiled in 1890, it stood in front of The Tribune’s building. By 1915, with the paper leasing corner, ground floor space in its building to a drugstore, the monument was moved to where it was originally intended: across the street, in City Hall Park.