trouble to go around on the west side of the freight station with which the commodore overlaid and abolished St. John's Park, when the corporation of Trinity Parish had sold him that part of its birthright for a mess of pottage. Highly absurd as the Vanderbilt bronze artistically may be, it has one artistic advantage which better works of art, celebrating men worthier of commemoration in perennial bronze, very commonly lack. It is in its proper place, and, if it was, in fact, erected at its subject's proper charges, one may almost say that it is no business of the public's. It is incorporated with a building which may fairly be regarded as the monument of the hero thus commemorated. That is a rare merit in a public statue. Hardly another of the public statues of New York shares it. To be sure, George Washington as President is entirely in place in Wall Street, and George Washington as general is not out of place in Union Square. He was on horseback there or thereabouts. Horace Greeley is appropriately in serted in the show-window on the ground-floor of the Tribune Building, which indeed was designed to contain his effigy-much more appropriately than another effigy of him placed so as to receive the drippings of the elevated railroad. Good old Peter Cooper appropriately confronts, or rather endorses, the Cooper Institute, and is protected from the weather by a classic canopy instead of the actual and invariable umbrella. But where else in New York can you find a portrait statue placed where it has either "literary" or decorative significance? From the literary point of view, one of the saddest aspects of the matter is that men who might have been readily recognized as entitled to commemoration in connection with institutions with which they had had something to do merely excite ribald inquiry when their images are dumped down in some casual open space. The Woman's Hospital, at the top of Central Park, is the virtual monument of a provident and benevolent physician, Dr. Marion Sims, whose statue would most pertinently adorn its court-yard, or a niche in one of its façades. Its absence is conspicuous. But if you enter Bryant Park, three miles to the southward, you will see an irrelevant and impertinent statue of the founder of the Woman's Hospital standing there "to advertise mystery and invite speculation." Similarly, the statue of William E. Dodge, a philanthropic and public-spirited merchant of time, and in particular one of the pillars of the Chamber of Commerce, which, in fact, contributed to the representation of him which crowns an exedra in Herald Square where it again provokes inquiry. In front of the Chamber of Commerce building, on the other hand, or incorporated with that edifice, the statue would have had meaning and relevancy. To be sure, the building is later than the statue. But the Post Office in City Hall Park is earlier than the statue to "Sunset" Cox, who owes it to Congressional service he did the lettercarriers, and it would have been properly placed in connection with the edifice, whereas at present it crieth, or at least gesticulateth, and stretcheth out its hand in Astor Place, and no man regardeth it, or regardeth only to resent the obstruction to the highway. Soothly, S. S. was not a statuesque figure, but he might nevertheless have made a decent and becoming appearance if incorporated at full length with the exterior of the Post Office, or haply truncated into a bust in the corridor thereof, like the lamented Postmaster Pearson. And there is Alexander S. Holley, whose memory is warmly cherished by metallurgists by reason of some modification in the Bessemer process which he introduced. For which reason the dignified bust of him which now "dedecorates" Washington Square would have decorated the Engineers' Club in Fortieth Street, or the building of the Engineers' Society in Fiftyseventh, instead of tempting the boyish frequenters of the square to "heave half a brick at him" by way of attesting their own ignorance of his achievements and his eminence. At the time when this bust was “inaugurated" there appeared a newspaper defence of its position against a newspaper attack much in the spirit of these present remarks, which defence set forth the "educational value" to the riparian and foreign-born youth of Washington Square of being induced to learn who Holley was and what he had done. In view of the shortness and uncertainty of human life, and of the number of things more pressing for the alien child to learn, the vindication takes a touch of burlesque. In Philadelphia things are better in this respect. From the statue of Stephen Girard, "Mariner and Merchant," one learns, probably to his surprise, that the pigtail survived the knee-breeches, and, in at least this instance, synchronized with the flapping and pendulous trouser-leg. But the New Yorker has gladly or sadly to own that the public statues in Philadelphia are by no means, as a rule, so sporad ically and eccentrically placed as those of New York. In large part they are massed around the public buildings, where the heroes of Pennsylvania in general and Philadelphia in particular ought to be. Not surprising that they should be so largely equestrian statues of heroes of whom the most memorable are more worthily commemorated out in Fairmount Park. The equestrian show around the public buildings may recall to the reading observer that delightful couplet of the unsuccessful celebrant of the battle of Blenheim: "Think of two hundred gentlemen at least, And each man mounted on his capering beast." There are really nothing like two hundred (“two thousand” is the original), but the visitor certainly does get the notion that there is a considerable deal of equestrian commemoration in Philadelphia. He also gets the notion that the equestrian figures, many or few, are properly placed with reference to a big and central public building. Not less so, in fact more so, as he goes southward and surveys Baltimore. By dint of natural advantages or "civic improvement," or both, Baltimore possesses, in the region of Mount Vernon Place, a much more seemly scene than most of her sister cities for the commemoration of her local worthies. (Note always that we are not talking about the intrinsic merit of the statuary, but only about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the setting which has been provided for it.) And, in that wide avenue up the hill, Baltimore has such a setting which, beginning in 1817 with Robert Mills's Washington Monument, that dignified Doric column, she has continued to fill with almost unvarying good luck, and to a very impressive result. So many things have contributed to this result, by no means all of them the effect of art and man's device, that one cannot reasonably exhort other cities to go and do likewise. He can only congratulate the "Monumental City" on her exceptional felicity. Washington ought to be the most successful in this respect of all our cities. As we are only just beginning, thanks to the labors of the McKim-Burnham Commission, to appreciate, it was planned as a "Monumental City" which Baltimore was not. The "circles" accruing from the street plan, “a wheel laid on a gridiron," as Mr. Muirhead has it, offer settings for statues, where they can be really seen, from proper distances, and where each may fulfil the Japanese notion of a solitary decoration which shall, for the time being, fill and content the eye. Some of these opportunities, we are all agreed, have been worthily employed. Others, we are equally agreed, have been cast before inappreciative sculptors. But we must also agree that the good and the bad alike gain, that the good are better and the bad less bad, in their total effect, by the isolation and segregation and frame and vista which they owe to the original plan of the city, the plan which offers so many temptations and invitations to monumental decoration with which the commoner "gridiron" plan of American cities cannot possibly compete. Not, to be sure, that all statues are well placed, even in Washington, and by no means that all the tempting sites for statues are as yet occupied. * The latter fact is gratifying, the former fact depressing. For example, there is that Hancock down in Pennsylvania Avenue. Can one ever come up the avenue without a vehement desire to abolish not only the actual statue, although the actuality may exacerbate his impatience, but any statue at all at that point, at which, in a busy thoroughfare, he must dodge about and elude the traffic at his proper risk, in order to gain a point of view? Doubtless, the most obvious moral to be drawn from these comparisons is that to the securing of suitable sites for monuments, whether architectural or sculptural, the rectangular street plan borrowed by New York from Philadelphia is an obstacle wellnigh insurmountable. There is nothing to be said in favor of that arrangement excepting that it is a convenient arrangement. And that argument Fred. Law Olmsted disposed of, a full generation ago, when he was vainly endeavoring to prevent the extension of the street system of Manhattan Island beyond Manhattan Island, and proving that “the attempt to make all parts of a great city equally convenient for all uses" must result in making them equally inconvenient. But, so fully and expensively are New York and Philadelphia committed to their imposed street systems that to tell either to lay itself out anew is much like Bret Harte's prescription that in order to be virtuous you should begin by educating your grandmother. Some circumvention of the system is indeed possible. Philadelphia has planted her City Hall squarely across the most important of the longitudinal and lateral thoroughfares of her system. New York has stopped certain of her cross streets with a railroad station, a public library, a cathedral, a college, an art museum, to the great advantage of the monuments and at no cost in practical convenience. This process can and should be carried further when the importance of a building justifies the exception. And, short of this, good æsthetic results may be derived, and even suitable sites for monuments may accrue, from rounding or truncating street corners out of their normal rectangularity. That there are still such sites, in spite of the system, is shown by the placing of one of New York's latest monuments-that to Verrazano, which our compatriots of "Latin" origin have done themselves credit by erecting in advance of any adequate sculptural commemoration of Henry Hudson, thus emphasizing their contention that "Hudson's River" was really discovered, not by an Englishman in the Dutch service, but by an Italian in the French service; further emphasized by the quotation from John Fiske inscribed upon the pedestal "There can be no doubt whatever as to Verrazano's entering New York Harbor in 1524." A statue of Verrazano must overlook that harbor, and on the Battery the statue of the Florentine explorer, taking the appropriate form of a "terminus," is as luckily placed as wrought. If it be out of the question that a municipality once "regularly laid out" shall lay itself out over again and irregularly, it is not impracticable that every municipality shall "highly resolve" not to authorize any monument whatsoever until it has provided a seemly "place to put it." Given the gridiron, and that restriction will very often and perhaps commonly mean that the monument shall be conjoined or incorporated with a building. All the better. The association of sculpture with architecture, in the cases of public buildings of monumental pretensions, is thus far with us tentative and exceptional. It is much to be wished that it may become habitual and obligatory, to the advantage of both arts as well as to the solution of the particular problem of finding sites for monuments. MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER. |