Or: A list of sites in NYC to re-name, post-haste.
Christopher Columbus Day is typically honored in New York City with a parade uptown and, mystifyingly, a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This year, due to COVID restrictions, the parade is digital. It was still broadcast on TV. Indigenous Peoples Day is celebrated today as well, and marches are generally planned for the same time. As a result, there’s usually security at Columbus Circle, lest it get a bath in red paint again.
The parade marches up Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to 72nd Street.
Columbus isn’t a “difficult” figure (like, say, Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G.), so much as an ignominious one who shouldn’t be celebrated. He slaughtered, raped, and enslaved the indigenous peoples he encountered and is responsible for the genocide of Native Americans. Credited with “discovering” America, the continent was inhabited already—and Leif Erikson had arrived 500 years prior to Columbus and his three ships. Disease also wiped out the inhabitants of Hispaniola, proving to be more deadly than the Black Plague. Perhaps the city could find a different day to celebrate the accomplishments of Italian Americans in New York.
The following sites are named after Columbus, who never set foot in the city.
- Columbus Park in Brooklyn, between Adam and Court Streets, and Cadman Plaza West between Johnson Street and Fulton St. There is a statue of Christopher Columbus in front of the Kings County Supreme Court.
- Columbus Park, between Baxter and Mulberry Streets in Lower Manhattan. Named in 1911.
- Columbus Avenue, Ninth Avenue between West 59th and 110th Streets. This is related to the Columbus Avenue Line, which runs along Columbus Avenue, 116th Street, and Lenox Avenue from Lower Manhattan to Harlem. Previously a streetcar line, it’s now the route for the M7 bus.
- Christopher Columbus in Central Park commissioned to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the colonizer’s arrival in the Americas.
- Columbus Circle, which contains Central Park’s second Columbus statue, also commissioned for the 400th anniversary, is a traffic circle with a 76-foot tall monument to Italy’s hero. The statue is 14-feet high. The monument was among the proposed attractions for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 90-day review of potentially hateful monuments following the 2017 “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. The National Park Service added the statue to the National Register of Historic Places the following year. Governor Andrew Cuomo said this year that the statue “appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York.” The Circle is the namesake for the nearby IRT subway station, served by the 1 train. The station includes a “decoration” from 1904 and a series of murals, Hello Columbus!, from 1992.
- The man is commemorated in painting and statue at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in Bowling Green.
- Columbus Square Park in Astoria, Queens, contains Columbus Triangle and a statue erected in 1941. Funds were raised in the 1920s and the statue was completed through the New York City Works Progress Administration Art Project. The statue was hidden in Queens Borough Hall during WWII; area leaders feared it would get turned into scrap metal for the War.
- D’Auria-Murphy Triangle, on Adams Place between Cresent Avenue and E. 183 Street, hosts a statue. The Triangle is named for the D’Auria-Murphy American Legion Post in the Belmont neighborhood. The Legion planned to name itself after the mayor, John P. Mitchel. When Mitchel failed to show up the the elaborate commemoration, the Legion quickly re-named the Post after John D’Auria and Henry J. Murphy, who died that year fighting in WWI. Some of these details are unclear: Mitchel lost his bid for re-election in 1917, and joined the Air Force the next year and died in July when he fell out of a plane and landed in a Louisiana marsh.
The bust of Columbus is the park’s “centerpiece” and was relocated from P.S. 45 at Bathgate Avenue and East 189th Street when the park was renovated in 1992.
AND:
- New York state’s Columbia County, on the Hudson River, is also named in commemoration.
- Columbia University, originally King’s College (founded by King George II “in reaction” to Princeton University’s founding), was renamed in 1784. In an effort to distance itself from British Rule, many institutions and locales were renamed–and many of them in honor of Columbus.
Maybe we could find other figures to honor?
agirlingotham.com 