Father Francis Patrick Duffy, Times Square

• Sculptor: Charles Keck
• Dedicated: 1937
• Medium and size: Overall 17 feet; bronze figure (9 feet) in front of a granite cross (11 feet)
• Location: Broadway and Seventh Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets

November 6, 1914: Father Duffy Joins the Army

In 1917, Father Duffy wrote:

The men were prompt in putting on their masks as soon as the presence of gas was recognized, but it was found impossible to keep them on indefinitely and at the same time keep up the defense of the sector. By about midnight some of the men were sick as a result of the gas, and as the night wore on, one after another they began to feel its effects on their eyes, to cry, and gradually to go blind, so that by dawn a considerable number …were sitting by the Luneville road, completely blinded, and waiting their turn at an ambulance. -Duffy

 Father Duffy could not have imagined such a scene when he signed up as chaplain of the New-York based Sixty-Ninth Regiment on November 6, 1914: deadly mustard gas was first used only in September 1917. But when he signed up with the 69th, a political assassination in Serbia in June 1914 had already triggered Europe’s highly combustible mixture of political alliances and military brinksmanship. Europe had exploded into a war of such scope as the world had never seen before. Duffy and the 69th, on duty at the Mexican border, were recalled to New York when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. “Don’t join the 69th unless you want to be among the first to go to France,” said the 69th’s recruiting posters.

 In Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, 1919, Duffy recounted his experiences – sometimes charming, more often harrowing – in “the war to end all wars.” He faced tanks, machine guns, planes shooting bullets and dropping bombs. He watched men sicken or die of influenza, mumps, measles, and scarlet fever, as deadly as the most innovative military hardware and harder to control. By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, the Fighting 69th had lost 1,300 men in the Argonne offensive alone. Of the survivors, only about 600 were among the 3,500 who had arrived with the 69th barely a year before.

 Although he was not a soldier and refused to carry weapons, Father Duffy was always at the thick of the action and sustained serious wounds. Returning home to a hero’s welcome, the recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal, he was promptly given a position that required just as much courage and stamina as fighting on the Western Front. He was assigned to Holy Cross, the parish that included the notorious Hell’s Kitchen, one of New York’s most decrepit and most violent slums.

 Next time you pass Times Square (part of Duffy’s old parish), salute the only full-length statue of a priest in New York. Standing before a 17-foot-tall Celtic cross is a bronze Duffy nearly 8 feet tall, dressed in a World-War-I trench coat, gripping his Bible, with his helmet at his feet.

Chemical Warfare

In the photo below, men are wearing masks designed to forestall the devastating effects of the poisonous gas first used on battlefields during the “Great War.” The number of variations suggests how difficult it was to neutralize the effects of the gas.

Duffy described the effects of gas on the troops:

The men were prompt in putting on their masks as soon as the presence of gas was recognized, but it was found impossible to keep them on indefinitely and at the same time keep up the defense of the sector. By about midnight some of the men were sick as a result of the gas, and as the night wore on, one after another they began to feel its effects on their eyes, to cry, and gradually to go blind, so that by dawn a considerable number … were sitting by the Luneville road, completely blinded, and waiting their turn at an ambulance.

Duffy, Father Duffy’s Story, 1919

Charles Keck 

Keck (1875-1951) a native New Yorker, was a student of Augustus Saint Gaudens and Philip Martiny. He studied in Greece, Florence and Paris. His notable works include Stonewall Jackson and Lewis and Clark in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Manhattan has Letters and Science flanking the entrance to Columbia University, 1915 and 1925 (116th Street and Broadway), Father Duffy, 1937, Governor Alfred E. Smith with an accompanying relief, 1946 (Catherine Street between Monroe and Cherry), and Abraham Lincoln, 1948 (Madison Avenue near 133rd Street).

Brooklyn has the the Genius of Islam, 1900 (facade of the Brooklyn Museum), the 61st District War Memorial, 1922 (Greenwood Playground), and the Brooklyn War Memorial, 1951 (Cadman Plaza).

More

• For more on war memorials in Manhattan, see From Portraits to Puddles.
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