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This occasional series of blog posts will highlight the most important of the outdoor sculptures in New York City and provide some historical and art-historical context. To read other blog posts in this series, click on the New York City Sculpture tag. For photos of all outdoor sculptures in New York City in chronological order, see my Instagram page.

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/BIzmFEeh_Dw.

Before we look at changes in style and important sculptors, we’re doing a quick survey of the subjects of outdoor sculptures. In the first post in this series, we saw sculptures of animals and politicians. In the second, we saw our first military and literary heroes. The third post included a list of memorials to the Civil War, and the fourth post, figures active before 1800, including Founding Fathers.

In the late 1860s, a new subject appears: businessmen who expanded the range of human accomplishments. Not coincidentally, they start to appear around the time that the Gilded Age begins. The last major memorial to a businessman was erected just as the nation collapsed into the Great Depression.

1869: Vanderbilt

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), an uneducated farm boy, provided his fellow Americans with transportation by sailboat, steamboat, and railroads. He was worth $100 million or so when he died – probably the richest American of his time.

This sculpture now stands on the south façade of Grand Central Terminal (at the level of the Park Avenue viaduct), but it was originally commissioned as the centerpiece of a 150-foot-long, 31-foot-high pediment on Vanderbilt’s Hudson River Railroad Freight Depot, just south of Canal Street. (More here.) So New York City’s first sculpture honoring a businessman was commissioned by the businessman himself. But several other important businessmen were honored within a decade.

1870: Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse’s telegraph changed the pace of communication worldwide, and in so doing made New York City the nation’s financial hub. After all, why deal with a stock market in Philadelphia or Boston when you could contact Wall Street directly? Funds for this statue were raised by telegraph operators across the country when Morse was 79. More here.

This was the last sculpture placed in Central Park while its subject was still alive to attend the dedication. In order to keep the Park from filling up with sculptures of people who might turn out to be insignificant, the Park Commissioners ruled in 1873 that at least five years had to elapse after a person’s death before a sculpture could be erected to honor them.

1872: Fulton

Robert Fulton (1765-1815) was the inventor of the Clermont, the first functioning steamboat. Its introduction in 1807 led to a revolution in river and ocean travel. This sculpture, commissioned by the Society of Old Brooklynites, originally stood near the Fulton Ferry House at the foot of Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Currently standing at Schenectady Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn is a bronze copy of the original (very deteriorated) zinc sculpture. More here.

1885: Dodge

Speaking of men who turned out to be (relatively) insignificant: at the dedication of this sculpture of William Earl Dodge (1805-1883), the Mayor of New York said, “There are men who can wait for recognition, and there are, on the other hand, characters which demand present recognition, if recognition is ever to be given.” John Quincy Adams Ward (on whose works I’ll do a blog post presently) sculpted this elegant figure of Dodge, co-founder of Phelps Dodge, a major mining company for almost a century. Dodge was more widely known as the “Christian Merchant.” The pile of books on which he elegantly leans reminds us that he was a gentleman of learning and culture as well as a businessman. More here.

1890: Holley

A few years after he sculpted Dodge, John Quincy Adams Ward created this bust of Alexander Lyman Holley. When railroads were spreading across America, the average life of rails – made of iron – was two years. Holley almost single-handedly introduced mass steel production to the United States, designing eleven of the twelve Bessemer plants built here. The average life of steel rails was close to fifteen years. More here.

1890 and 1892: Greeley

Horace Greeley (1811-1872) was founder and editor of the enormously influential New York Tribune, the first New York newspaper to attempt to provide all the information an educated man needed to run his life and his business. Greeley is honored with two full-size bronze figures in Manhattan and a bronze bust at his grave in the Green-Wood Cemetery. The best of the three sculptures is, not surprisingly, by John Quincy Adams Ward. It was commissioned for a niche on the Tribune headquarters near the Brooklyn Bridge. For the other full-size bronze, see here.

1892: Sims

Research and surgical procedures by the “Father of Gynecology” saved uncounted thousands of women from suffering and dying from “female complaints.” This bronze of Dr. J. Marion Sims (1813-1883) by Ferdinand von Miller II formerly stood on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine. It will eventually reappear in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. More here.

1894: Cooper

Peter Cooper’s successes and innovations ranged from the I-beam and the “Tom Thumb” locomotive to powdered gelatin (which we know as “jello”). As a child Cooper only attended school for fifty-two days. Feeling that he would have wasted less time as an innovator had he been better educated, Cooper (in his sixties) established and endowed the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Augustus Saint Gaudens, an early student at Cooper Union, became one of America’s most renowned sculptors. He created this work honoring the founder of the Cooper Union. (Blog post upcoming on Saint Gaudens.) More on Cooper here.

1903: Ericsson

During the Civil War, John Ericsson (1803-1889), a Swedish-born engineer, designed the Monitor, the Union’s first ironclad. Ericsson here holds a model of the Monitor. (For more, see here and here.) Jonathan Scott Hartley, the sculptor of this portrait, was so dissatisfied with his original Ericsson (dedicated 1893) that he paid to have this version cast instead. The Monitor is also honored with a sculpture in McGolrick Park, Brooklyn, near where the ironclad was constructed.

1930: Rea

Samuel Rea (1855-1929) was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad for over a decade, including the years when the PRR tunnel was built under the Hudson River and the original, grand Pennsylvania Station was completed. Rea has a model of part of the station under his hand. This sculpture was originally set in a niche high on the wall inside Penn Station. It’s the work of Adolph A. Weinman, who created many of the sculptures for the original Penn Station. More here.

More sculptures of businessmen

You remember how, in posts on sculptures honoring the military, historical figures, heroes of immigrants, and so on, I listed additional examples at the end? Well, I’m not doing that here because the ones above are the only tributes to specific businessmen in New York City.

It is not a coincidence that such sculptures became scarce in the early decades of the twentieth century. That period saw the rise of the Progressive movement, which considered industrialization, urbanization, and immigration as burgeoning problems that could only be eliminated or alleviated by massive legislative reforms. Care to guess what category of subjects becomes common in the early twentieth century?

But before we go to those: next week, we’ll look at sculptures honoring figures in the arts.

More

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