Abroad in New York

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Columbus Circle is a historic mess. A pedestrian nightmare, the circle has always been an uninspiring hodge-podge of buildings.


In recent memory we have had three buildings on the circle that have either disappeared or been altered. The New York Coliseum yielded to the Time Warner Center. As to the latter, I am not a fan of buildings that traffic in knife-edge imagery, for I cannot see how they are intended to be other than unsettling, no matter how elegant their execution. That said, who cannot cheer the demise of the Coliseum?


The 1960s Gulf & Western Building got gussied up as the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The one truly interesting building on the circle, Edward Durell Stone’s Gallery of Modern Art, shall soon be unrecognizable when it completes its transformation into the Museum of Arts and Design.


The best thing in Columbus Circle is its namesake monument. The Columbus Monument takes the ancient form of a rostral column-the only one in New York. The column rises in the center of the circle. It has long suggested a Classical treatment for the circle as a whole, a sweeping ensemble of colonnaded buildings, perhaps. The lost opportunity makes one weep.


The Time Warner Center, though, affords us an unexpected opportunity. Many people find the Time Warner shopping mall dull. I, however, love the views from within, onto the circle and westward along 59th Street. Look out from the fourth floor. Never in my lifetime has the Columbus column appeared to better advantage. One may look at it clearly and in its totality, lined up axially, with the park to the left and the Gallery of Modern Art to the right.


The monument was dedicated on October 12, 1892 – the 400th anniversary of the sighting of land by Columbus’s party. A Sicilian sculptor named Gaetano Russo created the monument. A marble statue of Columbus surmounts a granite column. On the south side of the base is the nude figure of winged youth, in marble, studying a globe. This and the statue of Columbus are of Carrara marble. In bronze we see two bas-reliefs of Columbus’s voyage, and an American bald eagle. The monument rises 77 feet. Ship’s prows and anchors festoon the column, as on the lost column of Augustus, on which the emperor hung the prows and anchors of ships he defeated in the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. We call this a “rostral column,” a form from Roman art. The name derives from “rostrum,” the curved prow of a Roman war galley.


Carlo Barsotti, publisher of Il Progresso, spearheaded the subscription among Italian New Yorkers to erect the monument-as he did for the surprisingly many other statues of Italians (Dante, Verdi, Verrazzano, Mazzini, Garibaldi) in our city. The new view restores our appreciation of the monument, long lost in the forlorn circle, and reminds us that we once felt the city worthy of such embellishment.


The New York Sun

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