Munsey's Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1, October 1891 — John Shaqi
Munsey's Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1, October 1891Various
History
Munsey's Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 1, October 1891
Various
American periodicals
The list of statues to be found in Central Park is a long and rather
curiously mixed one. Daniel Webster, Alexander Hamilton, FitzGreene
Halleck, S. F. B. Morse—these names are well worthy to be thus
commemorated. It is not inappropriate that the marble image of Columbus,
the discoverer of the New World, should stand in the chief pleasure
ground of its metropolis. Nor can there be any objection to the ideal
figures—that of Commerce, the cleverly modeled Indian Hunter, and the
memorial to the soldiers of the Seventh Regiment who fell in the civil
war. But strangely enough, all the other statues in the park are those
of foreigners. The German residents of New York presented the busts of
Humboldt and Schiller. Citizens of Italian birth erected the bust of
Mazzini, while sons of stern Caledonia contributed the statues of Burns
and Scott. From South America came the equestrian bronze of Bolivar, and
the list of monuments is completed by those of Shakespeare and Beethoven.
Great men as all these worthies were, and laudable as is the desire of
their fellow countrymen to do them honor, it is somewhat unfortunate
that the erection of a statue in Central Park should have come to be the
recognized method of giving expression to this feeling. If the process
is continued indefinitely, the park will become so thickly dotted with
the monuments of foreigners that the statues of Webster and Hamilton may
have to be removed to make room for the images of the deceased poets and
scientists of England and France, Finland and Kamskatka.
Of this tendency to cosmopolitanism the Mall seems to be headquarters.
Halleck (the poet, not the general), is the solitary American represented
in its statuary. The visitor may listen there to imported music
discoursed by a band principally composed of imported musicians, or
stroll to the terrace to admire the most ambitious ornament of the
park—the Bethesda fountain, which, although designed by a New York
artist—Miss Emma Stebbins—was modeled in Rome and cast in Munich.
[Illustration: IN THE NORTH PARK—A SOLITARY STROLL.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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