Who Are Those Guys in Central Park?
Central Park’s chief creators and designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’ genius is apparent whenever you stroll through the park, with its manicured lawns, ponds, brooks, rolling hills, and wilder areas like the Ramble. Every feature in Central Park is unique and isn’t repeated elsewhere, from its collection of cast iron and stone bridges and arches to its attractions like the Dairy and Carousel. Its over-850 acres can be discovered and rediscovered every time you walk around it: Central Park has had 150 years to collect a lot of attractions and features that’re “forgotten.” Not least among these is its statuary, which includes famous names from previous centuries who are more or less unknown today, except perhaps for high schoolers studying literature.
John Steell’s bronze of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in the Park’s Literary Walk is a replica portrait he did that has been in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh since 1845. Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh and met his older contemporary, Robert Burns, when he was 15. He became a poet and one of the first and finest practitioners of the literary novel with his Waverley series. American readers know him best from Ivanhoe (1819). Scott funded his printing firm with profits from his voluminous output. He had an egalitarian frame of mind, and his works are among the first to give prominent roles to workingmen instead of kings or princes. Greenwich Village’s Waverley Place takes its name from that novel.
Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) wrote romantic and satirical light verse. Little-read today, he was considered the most important and talented American poet of his time—he was called “The American Byron”—and he’s the first American poet to be honored with a sculpture in Central Park or anywhere else. Halleck was a close friend of Bronx poet Joseph Rodman Drake. They collaborated on The Croaker Papers, which appeared in the New York Post in 1819. Halleck and Drake are honored with street names in Hunt’s Point, the Bronx.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot…” Whether you know it or not, you’re quoting “Robbie” Burns (1759-1796) every New Year’s Eve. When Burns wrote Auld Lang Syne, it was put to different music, and wasn’t sung in its present form until decades later. Like most other Burns works, it was written in a thick Scottish dialect and can be understood only with special studies. Despite that, he’s regarded as the Scottish national poet; “Auld Lang Syne” doesn’t scratch the surface of his body of works. Burns was a political rebel, an opponent of organized religion, and was popular with the lasses. He died at 37 from a longstanding heart condition.
Burns, as well as Sir Walter Scott (see above) were sculpted by Scot Sir John Steell. Burns is shown with the manuscript of “To Mary in Heaven,” a poem written for a flame of his.
This is the oldest portrait sculpture in Central Park, as C. L. Richter’s bronze bust was installed in 1959 on the Mall and is now opposite the Central Park bandshell. The centennial of German playwright and philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) was met with enthusiastic celebrations around town, especially in German neighborhoods such as nearby Yorkville.
Schiller, who wrote the plays William Tell, Don Carlos, and Wallenstein, was a champion of human rights and liberty and also of German unification and reform. He was a close friend of fellow playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is memorialized in Bryant Park, and Ludwig von Beethoven, memorialized by bronzes in both Central and Prospect Parks. Schiller’s life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis when he was 46.
“Childhood’s joyland, mystic, merry Toyland
Once you pass its borders you can never return again.”
Victor Herbert (1859-1924) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and became a cellist in Richard Strauss‘ orchestra in Vienna. After moving to the USA in 1886, he gravitated to what we’d call “pop” music today, becoming a conductor and composer; he wrote the music for Naughty Marietta and Babes in Toyland, and composed songs still heard widely such as “Kiss Me Again” and “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” He was a founding member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Edmond Quinn’s bust, also on the Central Park Mall, was dedicated in 1927.
Located in a dead-end park path just south of the 96th Street Transverse Rd. just off 5th Ave., this replica of a life-size portrait of Danish sculptor Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) is the only portrait statue in New York City that’s a self-portrait and the second one of a Dane (Hans Christian Andersen, elsewhere in Central Park, is the other one).
Thorvaldsen was born to an Icelandic family who’d emigrated to Copenhagen. He’s considered the leading Neo-Classical sculptor of the 19th century. An 1892 bronze recasting of his self-portrait, originally sculpted in 1839, was presented to the US as a gift from Denmark on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Thorvaldsen’s death.
A.B. Thorvaldsen displayed an early talent for drawing and sculpture and was accepted to the Royal Danish Academy of Art when he was just 11. At 23 he moved to Italy, residing first in Palermo and Naples before settling in Rome in 1797. He studied sculpture with other expatriate Danes in Rome before landing a commission to execute a classical sculpture of Jason, the hero of the Argonauts myths, in 1801. He quickly gained work to create sculptures of other characters in classical myths, ordered by wealthy patrons who placed such works in their homes; he also sculpted Biblical scenes. He returned to Copenhagen in 1838 as an artist famed throughout Europe.
The original version of Thorvaldsen’s self-portrait can be seen in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. In the sculpture, executed when he was in his 60s, he presents himself as a younger man clad in an artists’ robe, carrying a hammer in his right hand and a chisel in his left. To today’s sensibilities, the image of Thorvaldsen leaning on a shapely, scantily-clad woman might seem alarming, but that wasn’t Thorvaldsen’s intention. The woman’s meant to be an allegorical statue representing Hope, that the artist depicted himself as leaning on after a hard day’s work.
Bronxites of a certain age who paid attention in their high school history classes might think that Webster Ave. was named for the famed Massachusetts Congressman and orator Daniel Webster. However, lengthy Webster Ave. was so named either for Albert Webster, an engineer in the Department of Public Works, or Joseph O.B. Webster, a surveyor in the same agency. Both men were active at the time the road was laid out in the 1870s.
However Daniel Webster (1782-1852) has a massive memorial of his own in Central Park, where Terrace and West Drives meet east of 71st St. Webster had a lengthy career in politics that followed an illustrious law career, serving as US Representative from Massachusetts (1813–17, 1823–27) Senator (1827–41, 1845–50), and Secretary of State under Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore (1841–43, 1850–52). He opposed the War of 1812; opposed, then supported, instituting tariffs on imported goods; and opposed early rumblings of Southern states’ secession in the 1830s with the phrase “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, which divided the Union into “free” and “slave” states.
Sculptor Thomas Ball’s bronze of the great orator was executed in 1868 and presented to NYC as a gift from Gordon W. Burnham in 1876.
Known as “The Boy Mayor” as the youngest NYC chief executive up to his time, John Purroy Mitchel was elected in 1913 at 34. After losing his bid for reelection in 1917, he was killed while training for the aviary corps in World War I after a freak accident, falling out of his plane after apparently not sufficiently tightening a seat belt. During Mitchel’s tenure in City Hall, a young man began working for NYC civil service who would leave a substantial mark over the next five decades… his name was Robert Moses. Adolph Weinman’s 1926 bust can be seen at the park entrance at 5th Ave. and 90th St.
Located at the east shore of Turtle Pond in Central Park (near the East Drive at about 80th St. is King Ladislaus Jagiello. King who? Ladislaus Jagiello, grand duke of Lithuania, became king of Poland in 1386; his reign is regarded as a revival of learning and literature in eastern Europe as it slowly emerged from the dark ages. Jagiello’s statue was sculpted by S.K. Ostrowski and originally appeared at the Polish pavilion at the first NYC World’s Fair. A gift from Poland, it was moved to its present site in 1945.
Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)