- Date: 1928
- Sculptor: Adolph A. Weinman
- Medium & size: Gilded bronze bust, over lifesize, on granite stele
- Location: Central Park, Fifth Ave. and 90th St.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of John Purroy Mitchel. Really? Nobody? Suppose I told you that New Yorkers once considered razing Belvedere Castle to make space for a memorial to him? Now that I have your interest …
For much of the nineteenth century, New York City government was notoriously corrupt. The consolidation of the five boroughs into New York City in 1898 (at the urging of the very upright Andrew Haswell Green) ironically allowed politicians more wide-reaching and complex methods of corruption.
In 1906, a young lawyer named John Purroy Mitchel made his name by exposing incompetence, waste, and inefficiency in city government. Thanks to his investigations, the borough presidents of Manhattan and the Bronx were dismissed.
In 1910, after an assassin’s bullet hospitalized William J. Gaynor, Mitchel became New York’s acting mayor.
When he ran for mayor himself several years later, Mitchel promised to lead a struggle “between the forces of decency, honesty, and public service, and the forces of public plunder.” His supporters included William Randolph Hearst, Theodore Roosevelt, and President Woodrow Wilson. Thirty-four-year-old Mitchel won a landslide victory and on January 1, 1914, was inaugurated as mayor.
Seven months later, the “war to end all wars” broke out in Europe. Mitchel became a fervent advocate of military training. While he was mayor, he even spent two summers training at Plattsburg.
But his constituents were not enthusiastic about Mitchel’s policies. In 1917, they cast twice as many votes for John F. Hylan, the mayoral candidate from Tammany Hall. As soon as he left office, Mitchel joined the army.
In July 1918, in the final stages of his training before being deployed to Europe, Mitchel fell out of his airplane and was killed. He was 38 years old.
New Yorkers had voted him out … but they were really sorry when he was gone for good. As six black horses drew the casket from City Hall to St. Patrick’s, a squad of twenty planes dropped flowers on the mourners.
More enduring memorials soon sprang up. In front of the recently completed New York Public Library, two lavishly embellished flagpoles were given plaques commemorating Mitchel.
An uptown park (intersection of Broadway, St. Nicholas Ave., and West 166 Street) was renamed Mitchel Square. The World War I memorial there, by Harriet Vanderbilt Whitney, is dedicated to neighborhood boys who died in the war. But it was also a memorial to Mitchel, New York City’s most famous casualty.
At Columbia University, Mitchel’s classmates commissioned a plaque for Hamilton Hall.
But the most prominent memorial to John Purroy Mitchel was intended for Central Park. The memorial committee drew up plans for a full-length sculpture in an elaborate marble setting. They proposed to make it the focal point of what they called a “much-needed direct route” between the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. True, the route would require the razing of the Belvedere. But a park commissioner dismissed the Belvedere as little used and “without value from an artistic standpoint.” Also as part of this very ambitious memorial, the nearby site of the old Reservoir was to be furnished with a swimming pool, playgrounds, a music stand, and ample seating.
When New York City appropriated the reservoir site for a memorial (never built) to all those who died in the Great War, the Mitchel Memorial was bumped to East 90th Street. It was dedicated there in 1928, ten years after Mitchel’s death.
More
- For more on Central Park in the 1850s-1870s, see my book Central Park: The Early Years.
- For early images of Central Park, see the pages on this site for through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870.
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