The Ice Rink at the Corner of Angels and Allegory
On Public Land, Private Profit and How the “Men" Stay In "Monument."
It is a truth written in stone that Central Park is for the people.1 As the park began opening in sections beginning in 1858, designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were insistent that the park only be separated from the streets around it by a low stone wall, enough to keep the city out of one’s quiet enjoyment of the park2 but not so much that it would keep a New Yorker out of the park: a gentle, rural welcome rather than an aristocratic warning to stay away. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it was an argument so emblematic that it would be fought and refought over the decades: who is New York for?
The monuments in Central Park have always been an answer to that question, because who we celebrate is a public statement on who we are.3 The answers are both as changeable as the leaves and as solid as the stones moved into place to create the landscapes of park. So let us speak of monuments and men and how they, like all of us, end up meeting in the park.4
Just to be sure we’re all on the same page: Central Park came to be as New York was entering a period of explosive population growth but while much of the population itself was still concentrated around lower Manhattan. People were coming to see city life as unhealthy. Some of that was just barely-coded “I don’t like these new immigrants and think their food smells funny” pearl-clutching, but questions of access to fresh air and clean water were legitimate. Land was selected north of where most people were living5 but in the midst of the grid that had been plotted to allow for the city to grow. Olmsted and Vaux won the design competition with their pitch that brought a democratic space into a Romantic landscape. To place things within some of the broad events that would shift the ground of the city itself, work on the park got underway a few years after the onset of the Great Famine in Ireland and just before the beginning of the Civil War here. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is astounding. To walk through the park is to experience multiple kinds of landscape and wilderness, from field to forest.
There were, as with any project, consultants and wealthy players bringing in designers to suit their taste, pushing a vision of the park based in the palaces of Europe, which makes for a pretty clear statement of intent. Olmsted and Vaux and the board of commissions put their answer forward in the annual report of the Board of Commissioners of 1862: “to New Yorkers it wholly belongs.” It wasn’t an academic exercise: Olmsted was pushing against a cadre of moneyed power brokers and their handpicked Parisian-trained designers who wanted wrought iron gates6—something like if Gramercy Park were hit by gamma rays and turned into the Hulk.7 Olmsted and the commissioners he won to his side in 1862 pushed for simplicity, with unfussy openings named for the New Yorkers who would pass through them and the New Yorkers who had helped create the city as well the park: Artisan, Scholar, Engineer, Merchant, All Saints,8 Boys, Children, Pioneer, Women, Girls, among them.9
It’s quite a welcome to live up to and maybe not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of the commemorations in the park. Certainly, to wander through the park now is to visit a veritable stable of great men on horses but there was only one statue in the original plan of the park so let us get to know her a little better than as a background player in the wedding announcements section of the paper.
Vaux conceived of a terrace overlooking a lake that could crown the mall, which he designed with Jacob Wrey Mould10 around 72nd Street towards the center of the park running east-west. The jewel of an assignment came to a woman sculptor named Emma Stebbins. Stebbins was born in New York in 1815. Her family was both supportive of her artistic aspirations and wealthy enough for that support to be meaningful. She had some successful exhibits and was nominated for the National Academy of Design as an associate member and in 1856 did what a lot people would opt to if they had the means: moved to Rome to study art. It’s in Rome that our angel gets her wings. While there, Emma Stebbins moved in a crowd of women sculptors11 and other artists and met renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman. They fell in love, Italian-style: they hosted parties (both dinner and waffle breakfasts) and went on picnics and drank a lot of wine. They had a commitment ceremony in 1858 and referred to themselves as married.12 Cushman was a great artist’s wife, able to promote and hype Stebbins in a way she wasn’t comfortable doing for herself.13
Cushman wasn’t the only person in Stebbins’ corner. Her brother, Henry Stebbins, was, very conveniently, the Board President and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Structures, Architecture and Fountains. He put all of his weight behind his sister and in 1863, she was approved by the committee, becoming the first woman to receive a commission for public art in New York City. Which sure is some nepotism. It would be prettier to say this glass ceiling was shattered with nothing but Emma Stebbins’ stone chisel,14 but she had a leg up from family wealth and influence. So her brother made sure she got her foot in the door, let’s look at what she did then. Still in Rome with Charlotte Cushman, she started sketching, then sculpting in clay, then plaster, and the molds were cast in bronze in Munich. There have always been stories that Cushman modeled for the angel, which would add a very charming layer to the monument though the face doesn’t quite match earlier busts Stebbins had carved of her.
The statue itself is taken from a bible story of the Angel of Waters blessing the healing waters of the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. Below the angel are four putti15 representing three of the blessings of water: purity, health and temperance.16 The statue, however, is less celebration of God’s miracles than the Croton Aqueduct and the cleaner water it brought.17 Water was deeply tied to health. This was an era when you might “take the waters” if your health were failing. More gravely, however,18 is that Emma Stebbins was sketching out this hymn to the virtues of water only nine years after John Snow19 shut down the Broad Street water pump in London, and a cholera epidemic with it. Cholera and other water-born illnesses cast a vast shadow over those living in a city, and it crossed class lines.20 It matters that before the park was filled with kings and generals, the one statue envisioned from the beginning was meant not to glorify the powerful but honor an achievement in civil engineering that touched the lives of all of the types of people the gates predicted would be visiting.
Stebbins and Cushman had returned to the States in 1870 for Cushman’s health—she had breast cancer—and so were there for the dedication in 1873. The initial press did not correctly gauge how iconic and beloved the fountain would become. The descriptions in the write-up in the Times are quite snide21 to a degree that I regret there’s no byline:
"The order for this grand fountain...was given to Miss Emma Stebbins, a sculptor apparently of New-York,22 though less known to New-Yorkers than some others of whom we are with justice very proud… The design seems more appropriate to a medicinal spring than to an artificial fountain raised to gratify the semi-poetic instinct which slumbers in every breast… When a feebly-pretty idealess thing of bronze was revealed the revulsion of feeling was painful…"
Harsh but subjectivity is subjective. Where it starts to really take off the white gloves is the description of the angel herself:
"From a rear view, the figure resembles a servant girl executing a polka'pas seul in the privacy of the back kitchen23… The head is a distinctly male head, of a classical-commonplace, meaningless beauty.24
New Yorkers may take the right to loudly dislike things quite seriously, but once you’re using the appearance of being working class pejoratively, you may have given away the game on your metric, and made it plain who is entitled to see themselves lifted up and who should stay in the kitchen. By 1873, however, Stebbins had stepped away from her work to take care of Cushman, who died three years later. Her obituary in the Times, after extolling her virtues despite the fact “she was, it is true, but an actress”25 said that “she never married, but lived and died a virgin queen of the dramatic stage.”26 Stebbins spent much of her widowhood working on a biography of Cushman, which was published in 1899 and the review in the Times—mostly praise of Cushman and lamenting that no one is her equal but also calling her masculine—is the only time their names were printed together. Stebbins died in 1882 of a respiratory illness probably not helped by doing her own carving and was buried in Green-Wood in Brooklyn in a family plot, far from Cushman who was buried outside Boston. The Angel of the Waters has grown into an icon, even as Stebbins’ name, her love, and the boldness of celebrating something as simple as clean water fades beneath of the soft folds her robe and gentle face.
The Angel of the Waters would soon get company whose depth of meaning and full message would also be tucked behind a long skirt. We’re in 1891: roof tanks are becoming de rigueur as part of the skyline and the water supply; Ellis Island is months away from opening to handle the waves immigrants coming through the port of New York; Toulouse-Lautrec, Fabergé, James Ensor, Mary Cassatt, and Paul Gauguin are all coming out with new work, and adopted New Yorker General William Tecumseh Sherman died.27 Friends and members of the Chamber of Commerce wanted to honor him with a statue.28 The goal was to be done by 1894 but there was so much back and forth about the location (the west side? Near Grant’s tomb? The central mall of the park?) that it wasn’t completed until 1903.29 The winning location was the Grand Army Plaza,30 with Sherman on his horse Ontario being led by the goddess Victory.
The statue was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was born in Dublin in 1848 to an Irish mother and French father. The family moved to New York as an infant and he grew up here, going to PS 40 which is now named for him.31
He apprenticed to a cameo-carver as a teen and took classes at Cooper-Union before going to Paris to study and then onto Rome in 187032 where he met and married an American art student named Augusta Fisher Homer. Coming into his prime as a lot of the Civil War heroes who had survived the war were passing away meant Saint-Gaudens created memorials to a lot of Union leaders: Robert Gould Shaw, Lincoln, and John A. Logan, as well as a monument in Dublin to Charles Stewart Parnell, figures from classical mythology like the Diana commissioned by Stanford White for the original Madison Square Garden,33 and the $20 Liberty coin. Liberty and Nike shared a model, a woman named Hettie Anderson whose beauty Saint-Gaudens would praise as both regal and divine and whose presence he often cited as something he could not do without.
Hettie Anderson was born Harriette Eugenia Dickerson in Columbia, South Carolina in 1873. She was Black, with some family that had been free and even owned land before the Civil War. As Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow choked back the victories that had been won, many of the Dickersons left for the northeast and Midwest. Harriette Dickerson moved to New York with her mother in the 1890’s, settling on the upper west side and changing her name to Hettie Anderson.34 They were both light-skinned and the census marked them as white.35 She got work as a seamstress, as her mother had been, as well as some clerking, and also took classes at the Art Students League on West 57th.
Whether through the Art Students League or not, she began working as an artist model and found tremendous success. She was a favorite of some of the big names of Beaux Arts sculpture: she was the Spirit of Life for Daniel Chester French and his Angel of Truth, an Athenian goddess-figure for John La Farge as well as Saint-Gaudens’ Victory and Liberty, which makes for a very magical-sounding resume. She was a favorite for her beauty, poise and figure, all of which were regularly praised by critics of the day, but what had Saint-Gaudens writing to friends about finding her indispensable was her stamina. Her contributions were valued and respected enough that Saint-Gaudens gifted her a bust made as a first study for Victory. Saint-Gaudens himself was diagnosed with cancer in 1900 and while he still served on a commission with Frederick Law Olmsted in 1901 about redesigning the Mall in DC, he also moved up to his home and studio in Cornish, New Hampshire and started an artist colony. After his death in 1907, his family kept it going until the land became a memorial and then a park. In 1908, Anderson copyrighted the bust Saint-Gaudens had made of her. This brought her into conflict with Saint-Gaudens’ son Homer.36 Homer Saint-Gaudens wanted to make reproductions of the bust to sell. Anderson was insistent that the value of the piece came from its uniqueness. She was a powerful advocate for her rights and beliefs and Homer’s response was try to diminish the role she played as model and erase her name from the record, referencing only a model that was “supposed to have negro blood in her veins.” I say this not to make Homer Saint-Gaudens37 the villain of the piece but because it’s important that while we don’t know how much or what Anderson told people about her family, this does pretty clearly suggest that Saint-Gaudens knew that the spirit of victory he cast leading the way forward was a Black woman. When the modeling jobs became fewer and farther between, La Farge and French helped Anderson get a position at the Met as a classroom attendant. She died in 1938 at 64. I’m not sure what became of her bust through the bulk of the twentieth century—after an exhibit in Indiana, it had been sent to Homer Saint-Gaudens which earned the museum director a blistering letter of reproof from Anderson for delivering it just where she didn’t want it—but in 1990, the bust she fought to protect was bought by her distant cousins at auction who reclaimed her image and helped put her name to it once again.
The thing about those monuments is that while Emma Stebbins and Hettie Anderson are real, angels and goddesses are not. Nothings blunts the teeth of a ferocious truth as quickly as needing to chew through several layers of allegory. So if we’re welcoming women and girls to the park38 are there not real women being commemorated and celebrated? The answer until very recently was: not really!
In 1915, Riverside Park put up a statue of Joan of Arc as commissioned from sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington to commemorate her 500th birthday,39 which pretty tidily straddles the line between real person and allegory and spiritual figure. As the twentieth century wore on and brought with it both a smattering of urban decay and the demolition of beloved spaces in the name of urban renewal, there was growing concern about preservation, both in the sense of green space and also the park not being well cared for. In 1965, the National Park Service designated Central Park a National Historic Landmark. Not coincidentally, 1965 marked the last monumental statue the park would put up for decades40 though at the time it seemed like it might be the last period.41 This is awkward timing as astute observers of history will note this is also the era when it was more widely acknowledged within the corridors of power that Black people existed and that sometimes women liked to do things like have their own money or control of their own bodies.42
Despite those strictures there was a woman who left her mark and her name on the park. The Wollman family was from Leavenworth, Kansas. Jonas and Betty Kohn Wollman had emigrated there around 1855 and had five children: Henry born in 1858, Morton, William, Kate who was born 1869, and the youngest son Benjamin, born in 1872. William Wollman, went into the securities business, moving first to Chicago in 1887 and then New York in 1898. Not to be tacky about things but he made a stupid amount of money and proceeded to put a great deal of thought into giving it away. In this, he had help from his siblings but especially from his sister Kate. Neither sibling married43 so she seemed to keep house for him, but in a "I mean, I supervised!" kind of way as they lived in the Waldorf-Astoria. William Wollman died at 69 in 1937, leaving five million dollars44 for his siblings to manage as a trust and distribute. There's a Wollman Park back in Leavenworth in honor of their parents. Their brother Morton Wollman left a trust that gave a $100 annual prize to the CCNY student with the best thesis and an additional $300,000 to the School of Business earmarked for the Commerce Center. Kate Wollman gave a million dollars to help build the NYU Children's Hospital, including the entrance on First Avenue and 31st Street. She also approached the City about a gift out of her own money, rather than the Wollman Foundation. And so in 1949, $600,000 later, under the impressive and quite racist eye of Robert Moses,45 the City broke ground on what would become Wollman Rink on the lower, eastern end of the park, around the equivalent of 6th Avenue and 63rd Street. It was Wollman Rink rather than Kate Wollman Rink46 because she wanted to honor her parents and four brothers who had all passed on by this point. At the ground breaking, Kate Wollman said simply that she hoped it would bring children happiness. Which is nice! And which it did.
On Saturday, April 28th, 1951, one of the front page headlines in the Times47 was “Pupils Hail Donor of Ice Rink in Park” with a short write-up about students from Yorkville's PS 151 having a ceremony to commemorate what a lovely time they'd had skating and in October of that same year, the Girl Scouts honored her for doing "best good deed of the year for children." These are clearly puff pieces,48 but they do reflect the important truth that the rink was really popular with New Yorkers. If your metric for success is tied to the promise and invitation inherent in the gates named by Olmsted just under a century earlier, then this hit it out of the park:49 Wollman has always been an appealing tourist spot, but it’s always been for New Yorkers despite that. Wollman herself was known to sit on the terrace that overlooks the rink and watch people enjoying the rink she made possible and would attend annual contests for figure and speed-skating and give awards to the winners.
To be clear, Wollman Rink didn't mark the first time skating was possible in the park:50 skating on the lakes had been popular since the park opened but anyone who's read or seen Little Women can tell you that's not the safest or most reliable fun to be had. Kate Wollman died in 1955 and after a service at Temple Emanu-El51 she was interred in Salem Fields in Queens.
Kate Wollman had given away more than some of today’s wealthy pay in taxes and Wollman Rink remained popular even without front page stories about grateful school kids. The popularity of Wollman Rink and its neighbor to the north, Lasker Rink, did not make them immune to the recession and neglect and disrepair took their toll.52 The financial crisis bled public amenities and services dry. By 1983 New York was climbing its way out of financial trouble, certainly with a boost the immigrants whose energy revived the city.53 In the park itself, help came from the newly created Central Park Conservancy. Born out of two advocacy groups and a multi-year study in urban planning and administration, the Conservancy brought together dedicated volunteers and a donor-base54 with municipal authority under an activist and urban planner named Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, creating a public-private hybrid that would maintain and restore the park. It was55 an unmitigated success and became an exemplar for parks across the country.
Recovery meant looking around at failing infrastructure, fixing what was broken and cleaning up the rest. Officials had the idea to use a new Freon gas freezing solution to create the ice to update Wollman Rink as it was refurbished. This mechanical detail matters because it didn’t work: the tubing system was damaged and the ice never froze properly, which is a bit of an existential crisis for an ice rink.56 It was 90% complete when a commissioner from the Parks Department capital projects brashly promised the press that the project would be completed by Christmas and he’d bet his job on it. Christmas came without the rink opening, and Donald Trump smelled blood in the unfrozen water.
Sweeping in on self-generated press, Trump anointed himself the white knight the project needed. Desperate for a win, the city agreed. Trump would be paid a contractor’s rate and the cost would be covered by the Capital Projects budget, the City’s funding allocation mechanism for infrastructure projects.57 In this arrangement, the 3.8 million dollars from the City was funneled directly into the Trump Organization and Trump was not subject to the same hiring constraints as the City itself—the ones meant to ensure transparency and protect the City from nepotism and self-dealing.58 Back on the more traditional saline cooling system, Wollman Rink reopened on November 1st, 1986 and Trump took control of the management of both Wollman and Lasker Rinks. Amongst the fanfare, reporters wondered in awe at this last leg coming in $750,000 under its three-million-dollar budget. That is a lot to be under! Awkwardly, that savings was not passed along to the City: the payments to Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump Ice don’t come in low, and the Board of Estimates Resolution was quite clear that Trump wasn’t to profit off the project. The Zamboni does not exist that could over smooth that math.
Getting the rinks running meant a new kind of public respectability for Trump59 but it was a one-way street, and all roads led to the Trump bank account. Trump created the Wollman Rink Organization as an offshoot of the Trump Organization to manage the rinks and also Trump Ice to sell to the rinks. This is a neat magic trick of one hand paying the other in City money for the job they hired themselves to do. The 2007 audit by the Comptroller’s office, confirmed by the Parks Department, reported more than $50,000 assigned for repairs at Lasker Rink (approximately 1/3 of the restoration budget) left unused and the work undone, which may have something to do Mayor De Blasio’s decision to close Lasker rather than undertake the necessary $150,000 renovations. The auditors found the spaces shoddily maintained, with repairs not even started three years after they were supposed to be finished. The 2007 audit also showed this lackadaisical approach reflected in the bookkeeping, with a kind of feet-dragging attitude one generally associates with a sullen teenager: muddled receipts turned over only after audits and licensing fees and other money paid late and under what was owed. When the money came rolling in, the Trump Organization made out a lot better than the city. Projections for 2017 showed $9.3 million going to the company that seems uninterested in maintaining the rinks adequately, and $2.1 million to the city that built them. That means more than three dollars going to the Trump family for every dollar to the City. If public spaces show us who we are by who we celebrate in monuments, they also do so by showing us who we reward. If the question at the core of every decision guiding the park has been who is New York for, 2008 brought the Trump Organization’s response as clearly as it possible. That answer came in the form of the applications to copyright “Central Park”60 to use on merchandise for its private profit, which is très Monsieur Thénardier from Les Mis. The request was rejected but the flag had been planted.
If we’re speaking of Trump and Central Park in the 1980’s, then there’s one more exploit that must be addressed: the Central Park Jogger/Exonerated 5 case in 1989. Trump chimed in via newspaper ad a month after the attack to call for the deaths of the five children in the most racist and histrionic terms the publishing standards of the day would allow. The stakes and consequences are obviously wildly, radically different than his posturing around the rink, but the stunts come from a similar place of disregard for governance and the lives of the New Yorkers who Olmsted saw passing through the gates.
If the Central Park Conservancy marks the ethical acme of bringing private actors into the public sphere, the Wollman Rink Organization is its mirror universe shadow.61 The Central Park Conservancy is a coming together of New Yorkers working and giving to take care of our shared space for the benefit of all. The Wollman Rink Organization chipped away at that same space with a toe pick for profit without regard to the cost shouldered by the city. The private profits being wrung out of this public land weren’t just coming from tourists:62 when schools do fun winter trips to Lasker and Wollman, that’s money coming out of school kids’ pockets into Trump’s. It is hard to feel the park “wholly belongs” to New Yorkers as Olmsted promised when its being sold back to us at a mark-up. To be “The People’s Park” is a promise that requires care and maintenance and can be dangerously weakened under bad governance.
Speaking of bad governance, on January 6, 2021, then-President Trump instigated a violent coup against the congressional certification of the election he notably lost.63 The Wollman Rink Organization’s contract with the park was expiring that year anyway and there had been moves in the City Council to find a new concessionaire64 but the riot at the Capitol led De Blasio to move up the timeline. The Central Park Conservancy made a bid, offering $50 million in renovations and their decades of responsible stewardship of park management and improvements. In a letter to De Blasio, then-Manhattan Borough President/current-District 6 City Council representative Gale Brewer wrote that "the City now has an opportunity to consider a new model so that these important City assets are managed first and foremost for the benefit and enjoyment of New Yorkers, not for the profit of individuals or private business." Sounds good, right?
De Blasio went in a different direction: a new purpose-built partnership operating under the name the Wollman Park Partners. Wollman Park Partners consists of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment,65 the Related Companies,66 and Equinox.67 There were concerns about the new arrangement, which had a real “second verse, same as the first” vibe. Gale Brewer pointed out the difficulty a proposed admission price hike would cause and questioned if the collective experience of the new managers was suitable to the needs of the city. Then-Comptroller Scott Stringer expressed his disquietude over those same rate hikes as well, further pointing out the lack of transparency in wider pricing made it harder to pinpoint the full cost. The contract didn’t include a share of the gross profit for the city,68 accessibility for community groups that had been agreed on,69 or itemized improvement lists and their costs.
Wollman Rink reopened under new management on October 28th, 2021. Greg Gushee of Related Companies said lovely things about how the rink is a community venture and not a commercial one, but the simple fact is that it is not being run by the community,70 it is being run by a commercial business.71 And if our public lands are at the disposal of private interests, are they reliably public? Olmsted felt quite forcefully that the park was for New Yorkers, and Kate Wollman spoke just as feelingly that she hoped to help ensure it was a place for happy children. That kind of two-way belonging requires active intention and ongoing growth.
Concessionaire decisions aside, there has been movement to change the stone face of the city. Technically, there are literally movements: a non-profit group called Monumental Woman advocated to add a statue of a real, existing woman to Central Park, “breaking the bronze ceiling” and She Builds NYC, a government initiative begun in 2018 by then-First Lady Chirlane McCray to ensure the statues celebrating notable New Yorkers look more like New Yorkers. Even earlier, however, there had been baby steps towards answering the call made by the Girls Gate and Women’s Gate. In 1992, a seated Gertrude Stein was put up72 on the east side of Bryant Park near the Schwarzman Library Building. 1989 saw Rockway Beach dedicate the Rockaway Women Veterans Memorial on Rockaway and Beach 94th Street. In 1996, Riverside Park put up a monument of Eleanor Roosevelt about a mile south of Joan of Arc. In 2008, Swing Low: Harriet Tubman was dedicated in Harlem, in a triangle between Frederick Douglass Boulevard, St Nicholas Avenue, and West 122nd. In August of 2020, the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument by sculptor Meredith Bergmann and sponsored by Monumental Women was unveiled on the mall, pulling double-duty as it honors specific women but also makes a kind of argument for all women.73
It features, from left to right, abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth, and suffragists Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton around a table, busy with work and debate. The monument was met with a healthy amount of enthusiasm, a fair amount of concern that Soujourner Truth’s presence was meant to whitewash the racist aspects of Anthony’s and Cady’s practices. It is inarguable fact, however, that the park went from no representations of real women to three. It is the promise of New York as a city always strive to be better, it’s not on New Yorkers to agree about it.
She Builds NYC’s first commission, a monument to commemorate the life and work of Congresswoman and presidential candidate Shirley Chisolm in Prospect Park, was approved in July of 2023. Other women shortlisted to be recognized in the near-ish future include Elizabeth Jennings Graham,74 Billie Holiday, and Dr. Helen Rodriguez Trías. 2023 also saw the unveiling of an ornamental gate for the recently renamed Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Williamsburg.75
Returning to Central Park, there’s one more gate to mention. In spite of Trump’s calls for violence, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Wise were exonerated in 2002. In December of 2022 for the first time since 1862, a gate was named: The Gate of the Exonerated, dedicated on 110th Street, west of 5th, directly across the street from the City Council’s District 9, now represented by Yusef Salaam.
These are all obviously symbolic victories: the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument is an important break from the No Girls Allowed tradition of statuary but it cannot secure anyone’s civil rights. The gate at the Marsha P. Johnson Park is stunning but it cannot safeguard the lives or freedoms of transgender Americans. Certainly, it’s easy to see the struggle for control over Wollman Rink as a battle of the extremely rich. The fact of it is, though, if it didn’t matter, it would all have been addressed already. Who is celebrated, who is lifted up as a hero, who we see on a pedestal every day defines a city and can come to shape the people who live there. After all, it’s our park, right?
Literally! I even mean “literally!” literally!
And I do mean quiet: early dictates on etiquette involved a lot of sitting and strolling and no games.
It’s one of many reasons why it’s worth tearing down Confederate monuments.
To clarify, we’re not talking about all of the history of the park today: it’s too big. In a very real, measurable way: I’ve been talking about one building at a time and Central Park is 843 acres, running two and a half miles north to south and half a mile across.
But absolutely home to communities like Seneca Village that were unceremoniously ousted via eminent domain.
I should say lest it sound like Olmsted was carrying the banner for the people of New York to seize the means of production of leisure, there was a lot of classism in the rules and prohibited activities, but at core the answer to the question of who New York should be centered on was always “the people who live there” for Olmsted. But also, when you hold Olmsted and Vaux against Richard Morris Hunt sniping that the park as they designed it was only fit for shepherds, the scales of relativity and perspective are going to do what they do.
And oh buddy, if you think the original rules of Central Park that prohibited sports were constricting, you should hear what you can’t do in Gramercy Park. Also, I personally don’t think there’s enough “oblige” in the noblesse oblige of opening the park to the public for an hour after sunset on Christmas Eve but that’s a grudge for a different day. Obviously, Gramercy Park is very lovely but if you don’t want me to grumble under my breath and shoot you dirty looks, don’t slam a fence in my face.
“All Saints” referred to civic and philanthropic leaders who set the moral tone of the city and there could be a whole Rodney Dangerfield-style routine about moral leadership being a real miracle.
The names were chosen in 1862 but largely wouldn’t be carved until the early twenty-first century by sculpture Shi-Jia Chen in a project led by the Central Park Conservancy, who will come up shortly.
Mould also designed the base of the fountain which will be a little ironic when we talk about the theme.
Henry James called them a “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’” though Cushman called her group “jolly female bachelors.” One assumes the former is meant to be pronounced with a light sneer and the latter with a hearty wink.
For much of history, this would be known as being “best gal pals.”
Cushman had a star’s charisma; Stebbins likened herself to a soft-shelled crab.
She did do her own carving when she worked in stone.
Small naked cherubs but it sounds classier when you use an Italian name.
The fourth putto stands for peace which makes a lot of sense for a fountain being built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but can’t be chalked up to water.
As someone who really likes talking about water towers, I support this and think we could all get into the habit of being excited about the mechanisms of water delivery.
Pun not intended, but not deleted either.
No relation to Game of Thrones; this one knew quite a lot.
Stebbins had lost a brother herself in an outbreak in 1837.
Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if Caroline Bingley went on RuPaul’s Drag Race but as a look queen who didn’t know how to approach the reading challenge being funny, so it just comes off joyless and mean? Well, I have great news for you.
They Might Be Giants won’t tell you this, but New York used to have a dash in it. The New-York Historical Society still does, which feels extremely appropriate in a “lead by example” kind of way.
I don’t know why the polka is catching strays, but I guess we can assume this writer does not believe in dancing like no one’s watching.
This line feels close enough to modern transphobia that it wouldn’t be out of place in the op-ed section today.
My Favorite Year did this joke better, if for no other reason than they knew they were making a joke.
There’s also liner notes from an early Richard Chamberlain record that describe him as living a monk-like existence with a larger collection of sweaters than other man in Hollywood.
He retired to New York after stepping down as commander general.
Much as I tend to comment on the amount of metal spent celebrated great men on horses, I don’t usually complain about Union leaders who aren’t George McClellan.
You know the timeline of the universe Carl Sagan created to show the brief amount of time humanity has existed in comparison to existence itself? I compare all delays to the Second Avenue subway for perspective.
Not the Brooklyn Grand Army Plaza: Brooklyn’s is grander and Manhattan’s has the Plaza.
What a flex!
A bit ships passing in the night with Emma Stebbins, who was returning from Rome that same year.
She’s not who we’re talking about but the model for Diana was Davida Johnson Clark, with whom Saint-Gaudens had an illegitimate son named Louis and to whom he would leave land in Kearney, New Jersey when he died. I mostly mention that because Kearney is named after Civil War General Phillip Kearney who had built a mansion named Bellegrove there to share with his mistress when his wife wouldn’t grant a divorce. I guess it’s just a really nice place to raise a family or two.
Hettie seems like a clear enough nickname but it’s not known how she came to choose Anderson.
It is worth clarifying that while Hettie could move through the world being taken for white—and did—there was never a disavowal of her family or her heritage. She side-stepped Jim Crow, she did not walk away from who she was.
His son with his wife, not the son tucked away in New Jersey.
Come on, we haven’t even gotten to Trump yet.
Real ones, even!
It's no Jane Wiedlin from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, but to be fair: Anna Hyantt lived too early to found the Go-Gos.
An equestrian statue of Jose Marti carved by Anna Hyatt Huntington that she gifted to the city via the Cuban government.
Spoiler.
Chicks, amirite?
There are no spouses buried with any of the siblings, though that doesn’t mean conclusively there wasn’t a partner who just felt strongly about being in their own family plot or was an early adherent of cremation. I cannot say if they just liked their freedom, liked someone they couldn’t marry, or simply never got around to it.
That would be impressive enough now but it would be the approximate purchasing power of 108 million today.
We’re not really getting into him today but for now we’ll say he was a man whose feelings on highways and people who aren’t white were inverted from what’s correct for a New Yorker.
That would be donated to Prospect Park, in what's now the LeFrak Center, home to Gotham Roller Derby.
Not top slot, but above the fold. It seemed to be a slow news day.
And probably not not related to the fact that Iphigene Bertha Ochs Sulzberger (of the Publishers of the New York Times Ochs and Sulzbergers) served as the Chairman of the Board of the Park Association of New York.
Heyooo.
Nor would it stay the only rink: Lasker Rink to the north came later, in 1966, with a similar donation from Loula Davis Lasker, a social worker and first generation American.
On 5th and 65th, five blocks north of Hettie Anderson leading Sherman and the Union army, and the same synagogue where George Gershwin’s funeral service was held.
They don't call them the Bad Old Days for nothing.
The Strangers Gate made a good point!
The list of founding donors can mostly be described as “unsurprising,” especially in the context of the park and New York philanthropy in general: Brook Astor (of the Astor Astors), George Delacorte (who would share his money and his name with the theater that houses Shakespeare in the Park), Paul Newman (actor/handsome person/salad dressing aficionado), George Soros (don’t tell Fox News: they’ll start arguing parks are a globalist conspiracy), Richard Gilder (there are programs and places named after him at the New-York Historical Society, the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park in addition to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, plus he was into Alexander Hamilton before it was cool), Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger (of the New York Times and ardent park support we already chatted about) and Jackie O.
And is!
You know when Odysseys has his crew tie him up so he doesn’t throw himself overboard when he hears the song of the sirens? That’s me not making any “thin ice” cracks. You’re welcome.
Just to underline because it will get shoved aside in a whirlwind of mythmaking: the City was picking up all the bills, including the ones made out to the Trump Organization.
Does this count as foreshadowing or is it just a bad habit?
It still gets thrown around today as proof that he’s a “get it done” kind of fella and that having money means you’re good at business and politics.
Trying to copyright “Central Park”! British drag queen Tayce said it best: “the cheek, the nerve, the audacity, the gall and the gumption!”
The Goatee’d Spock to Original Recipe Spock, as it were.
That’s not a dig at tourists: I will tell anyone who asks me where the subway/Dakota/museum is.
Uh, “allegedly.” Is it alleged when it happens in public and there are this many indictments?
A terrific word. It sounds like consigliere who only sees to hot chocolate.
The “Harris” is Josh Harris who made his money in private equity.
A real estate firm.
A brand more centered on luxury than broad accessibility.
So the city doesn’t benefit from the rink’s popularity.
There were signed-use agreements, so local needs weren’t being left out in the cold beyond the way all outdoor ice-skating is being out in the cold, but the Comptroller’s office was concerned that too much was being left unwritten.
And it could have been! The Conservancy was right there! They’re helping rebuild what once was Lasker Rink into the new Harlem Meer Center! Combining the park and community is their jam!
One with roots in private equity no less! There’s a scene in A Winter’s Tale when Camillo is left alone after King Leontes has demanded he kill King Polixenes in a jealous madness and Camillo reasons that even if he could think of a single example of regicide ever ending well, it would still be a bad idea. Just a thought on private equities companies taking over businesses.
Well, she’s seated, so half up, I guess.
It’s very meta.
We talked about her when her activism led to take on Chester A. Arthur as her lawyer.
After a bit of a false start when initial designs were reworked after not involving the community at all, either the neighborhood or Johnson’s family and the activists carrying forward her work.