Take a read through New York City’s new report on its public monuments, and you’ll come away with the distinct sense that the complex debate over public monuments is deeply unsuited for the way many Americans argue today, when facts are considered démodé. We live in a moment that doesn’t exactly reward slow, nuanced discussions.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them, and cities across the country already are–including New York, which recently released the controversial results of a group of 18 experts commissioned to study problematic monuments in the city. The commission, including artist Pepón Osorio, sociologist Richard Alba, Spelman College president Mary Schmidt Campbell, and architect Mabel O. Wilson, was created by Mayor Bill de Blasio after protests over confederate monuments left one anti-white supremacist protestor dead in Charlottesville and spurred a nationwide debate around public memorials in the fall of 2017, and it faced a deceptively simple question: How should we treat public monuments to figures who committed evil acts, but who were nevertheless memorialized with statues and plaques in their time?
Take a marker on Broadway in Manhattan for Philippe Pétain, a French general heralded as a hero during World War I, who went on to lead France’s Nazi-aiding Vichy government during World War II. Or a statue in Central Park of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology” who carried out excruciating experiments on non-consenting slave women. Or the statue of Theodore Roosevelt mounted on a horse outside the Museum of American History. Or the big one: The towering statue of Christopher Columbus at the center of the city’s eponymous traffic circle.
When it came to Pétain, the Nazi collaborator, the commission decided to keep the marker in place. In part, it says, because the marker is part of a larger installation that memorializes every ticker tape parade that’s ever gone down Broadway, including one for Pétain before World War II. “Clearly, some ticker-tape parades misjudged some so-called heroes whom history later cast in shadows,” they write. “It is often difficult for us to acknowledge judgments of the past from our perspective in the present, but removal of the vestiges of past decisions risks leading to cultural amnesia.” Instead, they ask the city to add historical context to the installation, like way-finding, and to rename the overall installation (“Canyon of Heroes”) to something that doesn’t characterize the subjects as heroes.
The commission was also in disagreement about whether to remove the Columbus statue. A majority voted to keep the statue, which many see as a monument to the violence and oppression of indigenous and colonized peoples and others see as a tribute to Italian-American heritage. The group unanimously voted to commission a group of new monuments to indigenous peoples within the next five years, as well as commission works of art that will be set up in proximity to the statue and create a mapping project to shed light on Lenape, Algonquian-language, Native New Yorker sites in the city–as well as designate an Indigenous Peoples Day and other educational measures.
These aren’t the outcomes many New Yorkers hoped for. The report suggests maintaining and contextualizing the impact of these four men, rather than removing their honorifics entirely. Will other cities adopt a similar framework for evaluating the people they monumentalized in centuries past? Or will officials choose to make unilateral decisions, or ignore controversy entirely? Over the next year, we’re likely to find out.
For now, I’d like to hear your opinions on whether these works should be removed, relocated, or contextualized. Email me at CoDTips@fastcompany.com to share your thoughts.