Straus Memorial

• Sculptor: Augustus Lukeman
• Architect: Evarts Tracy
• Dedicated: 1915
• Medium & size: Bronze (3 x 7 feet); granite fountain and exedra (approximately 15 feet wide)
• Location: West 106th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue

Straus Memorial: About the Sculpture

Who is this woman? Her features are so classically well-proportioned that she doesn’t seem to be a portrait; besides, portraits usually wear period costume to help the viewer identify them. Is she a mythological figure? Probably not, since she has no helmet, aegis, bow and arrow or other identifying feature. By elimination, then, she must be an allegorical or symbolic figure–but of what? Let’s gather clues from the details.

Based on her body language, she is meditative, rather than (for example) distraught with grief or struggling to solve an algebra problem. She’s reclining, relaxed, one foot dangling. Her eyelids are lowered, her head rests on one hand and the other hand is at her chin. She looks down into a reflecting pool, rather than at a busy street or the pages of a book. She seems, then, to be thinking of someone or something she remembers, not about what she can see right now.

Simple as it is, that’s the identity of this figure: she is Memory. The gilt inscription on the curved bench (exedra) behind the figure confirms this: “In memory of Isidor and Ida Straus, who were lost at sea in the Titanic disaster April 15, 1912. Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives and in their death they were not divided. II Samuel 1:23.” The inscription tells us whom the monument honors, but the sculpture’s dominant idea—that calm remembrance is a good and important activity—would be clear without the inscription.

One of the great pleasures of searching for the theme in a work such as this one is that it allows you to spend more time with the sculpture. To spend even more time with Memory, take a few minutes to study details such as the way the drapery flows along her figure. The folds of the thin fabric outline her hips and legs, emphasizing the body beneath the fabric. Many of the sculptures in this book have been portraits of nineteenth-century gentlemen in business attire. For such models of decorum, it would be inappropriate to reveal too much of the figure beneath the clothing. This sculpture is a reminder of how beautiful an inanimate figure can be.

Straus Memorial: About the Subject

Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, under clear skies and on a sea smooth as glass, the largest ship afloat was racing to set a speed record on her maiden voyage. Four hours later, after striking an iceberg, the luxury liner Titanic was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and 1,522 of her passengers and crew were dead.

Among those who perished were Isidor and Ida Straus, two of New York’s wealthiest and most beloved philanthropists. With a conviction that recalls Shakespeare (see below), Ida refused to board a lifeboat without her husband of forty-one years. Isidor refused to board until the last of the women and children had been taken off. Survivors reported seeing the pair on deck, arms around each others’ waists, in the hours before the Titanic went down. Isidor’s body was recovered and buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Ida’s remained lost at sea.

Isidor Straus was a classic example of a poor immigrant succeeding spectacularly, through intelligence and sheer hard work. In 1902 he and brother Nathan moved the department store they had recently purchased from Union Square up to Sixth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street, next door to the new home of Bennett’s Herald. At first they had to offer customers free transportation to persuade them to venture to such an unfashionable neighborhood. A few years later, when Pennsylvania Station opened at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, thousands of commuters and visitors suddenly found shopping there marvelously convenient. Isidor’s most spectacular and enduring monument is seventy-two blocks south of the Straus Memorial: Macy’s Herald Square, “the largest department store in the world.”

Audrey Munson, Super Model

During her teens and 20s, Audrey Munson (1891-1996) was in great demand as a model for sculptors: she had a talent for coming up with poses appropriate for the allegorical figures so popular in the early 20th century. Her figure and gestures are immortalized in many sculptures whose faces don’t look like hers. She even parlayed her fame and beauty into roles in early silent films.

But by the time Munson turned 30, her career was blighted by a media frenzy after her ex-landlord killed his wife for love of Audrey (so the press lasciviously speculated). She spent the last 65 years of her life in a mental hospital.

Above: A rare photo of Audrey in a cheerful mood.

Two of my favorite Munson appearances are as Manhattan (flanked by a peacock) and Brooklyn (flanked by a child reading a book).

In 1907 these were dedicated on the east end of the Manhattan Bridge, where new-fangled automobiles soon covered both with soot. Today Brooklyn and Manhattan bracket the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum.

For more Munson, see the Firemen’s Memorial and the Maine Memorial by Attilio Piccirilli, and America and Europe, two of the Continents by Daniel Chester French.

The Titanic

The Straus Memorial honors a couple who died on the Titanic. Although the Titanic was at the time the largest ship afloat, by today’s cruise-ship standards she was of moderate size, carrying a mere 2,435 passengers. (Today’s largest cruise ship carries 6,400.)

Above: The Titanic at the Southampton dock in April 1912.

One of the eeriest accounts of the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic is this survivor’s description of what he saw as his lifeboat was about to be picked up:

As we neared the Carpathia we saw in the dawning light what we thought was a full rigged schooner standing near her, and presently another behind her, all sails set, and we said, ‘They are fisher boats from the Newfoundland Bank and have seen the steamer lying to and are standing by to help.’ But in another five minutes the light shown pink on them, and we saw they were icebergs, towering many feet in the air, huge, glistening masses, deadly white, still and peaked in a way that had easily suggested a schooner. We glanced around the horizon and there were others wherever the eye could reach. The steamer we had to reach was surrounded by them…. (New York Times4/19/1912)

Macy’s, not Herald Square

Leaping from the enormous Titanic to quaintly small origins of the “World’s Largest Department Store”: when Macy’s was a storefront on 14th Street at Sixth Avenue, its name was so unfamiliar that it appears on the signage in smaller print than “shawls, cloaks, mantillas.”

More

• The Straus Memorial is one of 54 sculptures described in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
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