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• Date: 1888; unveiled in Bronx in 1899
• Sculptor: Ernst Herter
• Medium & size: Tyrolean marble, Dover marble, bronze, granite. Total height 19 feet. Basin diameter 34.5 feet.
• Location: Southern end of Joyce Kilmer Park, 161st Street, Bronx (just east of Yankee Stadium).

Although she’s often assumed to be from a folktale, the seductive Lorelei was in fact created by Clemens Brentano, a German romantic poet, in the early nineteenth century. In 1842, Brentano’s version was modified by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who turned her into a beautiful woman who sits high on a rock, combing her hair and singing, distracting sailors on the Rhine so that they are wrecked on the rocks below her. “The Lorelei” (English and German here) is  one of Heine’s most famous works, having been set to music by Franz Liszt and numerous others. Here’s Diana Damrau singing it.

This sculpture was designed for Heine’s birthplace, Dusseldorf, to commemorate the centennial of his birth. At the top is the Lorelei, wearing an elaborate jacket and skirt.

Below her on the base is a relief portrait of Heine.

Two more reliefs show a boy poking at a dragon (humor?), and a sphinx kissing a young man (early death?).

Around the pedestal are three mermaids. To our left of the relief of Heine is a mermaid symbolizing poetry; on the other side is one representing satire.

The third mermaid, on the back of the pedestal, represents Melancholy, with a gloomy expression and disheveled hair – disheveled, at least, by nineteenth-century standards. This is perhaps a reference to the fact that Heine spent the last eight years of his life paralyzed, confined to what he called his “mattress-grave”.

Why the Bronx rather than Dusseldorf?

Heine, the son of Jewish parents, converted to Lutheranism in hopes of a life in Academia. He was also a political radical. When this memorial was designed in the mid-nineteenth century in conservative, anti-Semitic Prussia, that was a fatal combination. The Lorelei sculpture was refused a site in his birthplace, Dusseldorf.

German-Americans in New York campaigned to have the fountain brought to New York City and placed at the main entrance to Central Park, at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. (The Sherman and Pulitzer Fountain weren’t placed there until several years later.) Others were much less enthusiastic about the fountain: the New York Times called it an “example of academic mediocrity”. Heine’s memorial was eventually assigned a site just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Yankee Stadium didn’t arrive just down the hill until 1923.

Attacks on the Lorelei

Long before the Bronx became dangerous territory, the Lorelei Fountain was under attack. The Christian Association of Abstinence described it as “indecent” in a court case in 1900, and another source of the time berated it as a “pornographic spectacle.” The sculpture also came under very literal attack. In 1900, the mermaids’ arms were cut off. In the 1970s, they were decapitated and covered with graffiti. The Parks Department restored the sculpture in 1999.

The most extensive source on the history of the Lorelei Fountain seems to be Dietrich Schubert, “Der Kampf um das erste Heine-Denkmal. Düsseldorf 1887–1893, Mainz 1893–1894, New York 1899”, in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch: Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 51, 1990, pp. 241–272. For this and the other quotations above, see the Wikipedia article on the Fountain.

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