Photo of the Day: “Reading Together” Sculpture, Teaneck Public Library, NJ

I’m a sucker for statues of kids falling in love with books, maybe because I was like that so long ago.

A few weeks ago, with winter still holding Bergen County in its icy grip, I wrote a post about such a sculpture in front of the Maywood Public Library.

Then, in late March, I came across one with the same idea, which I’ve photographed here: “Reading Together,” in the Children’s Reading Garden in the lawn outside the Teaneck Public Library.

This bronze sculpture was created by New Jersey artist Judith Peck. It’s a charming centerpiece of the garden, which was dedicated 30 years ago this coming July.

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.

Photo of the Day: ‘Jean-Marc’ Statue, New York City

A little over a week ago, heading toward a film at the Museum of Modern Art, I was struck by this image—a permanent sculpture at the northeast corner of 53^rd Street and Avenue of the Americas.

Jean-Marc was created in 2012 by the Parisian artist Xavier Veilhan. For this, his first permanent outdoor work in the US, he used stainless steel and polyurethane paint to create this unusual image of fellow French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Photo of the Day: The Wall Street Bull, NYC

Early the other morning, as I picked up that day’s copy of The Wall Street Journal, the owner of the convenience store where I bought the paper said to me, “I hear there's going to be a crash on Wall Street.”

I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Great, just great, I thought. Let’s see: Afghanistan's ended as a bloody mess. Hurricane Ida made a mess of my hometown. The pandemic’s still raging. There’s still way too many unemployed. And now, this?

“Well, no, I hadn’t heard that,” I muttered at last, tired before the day had barely begun.

Well, there are still incurable optimists who will have none of that negative talk about the stock market. They have kept it afloat for years, even when their confidence appeared more like what onetime Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”

Later that day, on only my second trip to New York City since the start of the pandemic, I saw the symbol of that hope in Lower Manhattan, near Bowling Green. The sculpture I photographed then, which accompanies this post, is formally named “The Charging Bull,” but many call it “The Wall Street Bull.” So shall I (even though some cynics may say that far too much bull is peddled in the Financial District on a regular basis).

Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica (who died in February this year) originally installed the 11-foot, 7,000-lb. sculpture in time for Christmas 1989, in front of the New York Stock Exchange. I don’t know many people who would turn their noses up at a free gift, but the people in charge of the Stock Exchange did, and got it removed.

But in the meantime, the big creature had endeared himself to many, many more others in the area, and they succeeded in transferring it two blocks away, to its current location. Now it's a tourist magnet. (Indeed, I had to wait quite a while for enough people to step away so that I could catch the bull, so to speak, in all his glory, alone but ready to charge.)

You can read more about this outdoor sculpture in this post from the Web site “The Wall Street Experience.”

Photo of the Day: ‘Leonia Moose,’ Erika and David Boyd Sculpture Garden, Leonia NJ

At twilight today, driving a couple of miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, I was observing several Christmas displays when this image drew my attention. Given the holiday decor all around me and the growing darkness, my first thought was that it was a representation of a reindeer. Then I saw the title of this work: Leonia Moose.

If any moose has ever been spotted in this town, it was not by me, and not after Leonia became an inner-ring suburb of New York rather than a rural area. Actually, it’s meant not to remind viewers of what is seen now but of what existed here centuries ago, when forests were filled with wildlife.

I couldn’t help but like Alberto Bursztyn’s work, which the Brooklyn artist assembled on site from natural fallen lumber collected in Leonia’s Highwood Hills forest.

This was one of five outdoor works installed during this year’s pandemic by the all-volunteer, non-profit organization Sculpture for Leonia.

Photo of the Day: Minute Man at Twilight, Lexington MA

I took this photo in October 2008, while staying just outside Boston. The afternoon light was waning fast when I came to the town green at Lexington, but I wanted to maximize my photos, as I wasn’t sure how many more opportunities I would have at this point in my trip to catch this sight.

Naturally, I would have preferred to have shot this when light was more abundant so the facial features would be more apparent. But in another sense, I like it as is. The essence of the Minute Man, after all, was vigilance, at all hours of the day or night.

In fact, twilight and beyond can be when dangers to liberty can most readily occur, when they are least visibility and when concentration is most relaxed.

This Minute Man statue stands at the intersection of Bedford Street and Massachusetts Avenue. It is commonly called the “Lexington Minute Man” statue to distinguish it from the other one by Daniel Chester French in nearby Concord—featuring on its base a stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” commemorating “the spot where the embattled farmer stood.”

The Lexington Minute Man was created by the English-born American sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson.

Photo of the Day: Irish Famine Monument, Cambridge MA

Some monuments—notably, those honoring Confederate heroes—are built in a relatively short period of time. Others—including this one, which I photographed on a trip to Boston and its surrounding area in 2008—are erected far later.

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s resulted in an estimated 1 million deaths and another million who emigrated to escape starvation, disease and grinding poverty. But those statistics don’t even begin to convey the trauma suffered by those who endured it. It affected the destinies of two countries—Ireland, which could never forget that a blight affected their potatoes but their British overlords produced the starvation; and the United States, where the Irish became the prototypical immigrant group.

For more than a century, the memory of that catastrophe was an open wound, best left to be forgotten by those who lived through it and their descendants. But in time, as the Irish carved out their niche in the United States, they not only began to probe the causes and effects of the famine, but also sought to commemorate it in tangible form, as in statuary.

Canbridge's Irish Famine Monument, located on Cambridge Common and cast by Maurice Carron, shows a family torn apart by the Great Hunger. It was dedicated in 1997, on the 150^th anniversary of the deadliest year of the famine, by Irish President Mary Robinson.

Carved on the memorial’s base is the central lesson learned about this massive tragedy: “"Never again should a people starve in a world of plenty."

Photo of the Day: Woman With Child, Brooklyn War Memorial, Cadman Plaza Park, Brooklyn NY

This image is a detail of a sculpture on the right side of the Brooklyn War Memorial in Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn. On the left side of the memorial, which I posted about 3½ years ago, is a male warrior. What you see here, bookending it, is a mother and child—what, in effect, the warrior is fighting for.

Both larger-than-life images were molded by the sculptor Charles Keck (1875–1951), who also created the statue of Fr. Francis Duffy (chaplain of New York’s famed 69^th Regiment during WWI), which now anchors the theater distinct in midtown Manhattan, in the square named for the priest.

Photo of the Day: Sculpture and Rider, Allegheny Landing, Pittsburgh

I took this photo in what seems like an eon ago, in terms of freedom of movement: last October, while on vacation in Pittsburgh. I hadn’t intended to do so at the time, but the image captures at once one of the unique appeals of this stretch of greenery between the 6th and 7th Street bridges on the north bank of the Allegheny River next to PNC Park, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ ballpark: its sculptures and its use for recreation. 

Since its dedication in 1984, Allegheny Landing has pointed the way for other major cities on how to capitalize, in a different way, on one of the original reasons for their existence: their location by rivers. In the beginning, rivers served as points of commerce; now, more primally, they remind us of the mainstay of life itself: water.

Photo of the Day: A Leader With a Sense of Right and Wrong

I have encountered this bronze equestrian statue of George Washington several times while walking near New York’s Union Square Park. My most recent sighting not only led me to take this photo, but to think about why it resonates with me so much. 

The oldest statue in New York City’s parks collection, this creation by Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) has withstood a great deal—the elements, of course, and movement from a traffic island at the southeast corner of the square to its central location in the south plaza. But it remains a point of reference for New Yorkers—most dramatically after 9/11, where it became a de facto shrine.

When I did a Google search to find out the number of statues in this country in honor of this iconic figure, the results amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands. You might as well try to count the number of grains of sand by the ocean. Heck, there’s even a monument to the first American President in London’s Trafalgar Square.

That last bit of unlikely recognition might owe something to the same instinct that led King George III to exclaim that the former American commander-in-chief’s renunciation of the Presidency after two terms “placed him in a light the most distinguished of any man living...the greatest character of the age."

Okay, now how many statues of Benedict Arnold are there in the United States? Less than a quarter of a statue. The national park containing Saratoga battlefield in upstate New York honors  the “memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental army, who was desperately wounded on this spot, winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution, and for himself the rank of Major General.”

Because Benedict Arnold tried to betray his country three years after Saratoga by handing West Point over to the British, the whole man could not be honored, not even named, only that part of him displaying courage—his boot.

Over time, Americans have become fascinated by our rogues while taking our heroes for granted—even feeling the need to take them down a peg. And so, the man once hailed by one of the men he commanded in the American Revolution, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen” is having his contributions slighted, when not outright forgotten.

Right-wing Republicans delight in mocking progressives for their politically correct tendency to remove statues. They have a point—until, that is, some of them reveal who their real idea of a hero is.

And so, a few weeks ago, listening to one of the Sunday morning news shows, I heard an admirer of the current White House incumbent hail him as our greatest President—ever.

(By the way, I refuse in this post to include the incumbent’s name. It only feeds his maniacal desire for attention. Instead, I’ll refer to him with an epithet first used by Spy Magazine three decades ago that serves equally well today: “short-fingered vulgarian”—SFV for short.)

No matter how ludicrous, ignorant, insane—okay, downright morally offensive—that judgment might be, this woman is by no means an outlier in the current GOP. A poll this past December by The Economist/YouGov found that a majority (53%) of GOP respondents think SFV is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. If that’s how they feel about the incumbent versus Honest Abe, another Republican, I’m afraid that poor George doesn’t stand a chance.

It's worthwhile, then, going over again why Americans valued the example of Washington for so long—and why Arnold was loathed.

The difference between the traitor and the hero—as well as their motives—are summed up extremely well in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution: 

“[Benedict] Arnold had never worried about the consequences of his actions. Guilt was simply not a part of his make-up since everything he did was, to his own mind, at least, justifiable….[But] Washington's sense of right and wrong existed outside the impulsive demands of his own self-interest. Rules mattered to Washington. Even though Congress had made his life miserable for the last four years, he had found ways to do what he considered best for his army and his country without challenging the supremacy of civil authority. To do otherwise, to declare himself, like the seventeenth-century English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, master of his army and his country, would require him to become 'lost to my own character.’”

By a stroke of luck, Arnold narrowly evaded being brought to justice for colluding with a foreign power. Boiling with resentment, set on recrimination, he felt unleashed as a newly commissioned Brigadier General in the British army, laying waste to Virginia. 

In the end, it did him no good. The British lost. Reviled alike by the countrymen whose trust he betrayed and the foreign handlers whose favors he bargained for, Arnold died, feeling more unappreciated than ever, two decades later, unforgiven for wildly conflating the public interest with his own private one.

That “sense of right and wrong” that mattered so much to his old commander—well, for a certain part of the populace that once hailed the stress on "characters" only a couple of decades ago, it seems so old-fashioned, much like the 110 “Rules of Civility,” which Washington copied out as a schoolboy and spent the rest of his life practicing. 

We are going to see soon if we continue to live in Washington’s America or the one desired by Arnold—animated by greed, dancing to the tune of outside forces who abominate democracy.

If we ever erect a statue in honor of the SFV so preferred by so many Republicans, I suggest that it be, in the manner of Arnold’s at Saratoga, not a Washington-style equestrian figure but something more appropriate—an upraised middle finger.