Meeting Alexander in New York City for dinner – Sutton Place Park

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At the end of 57th Street there’s a tiny park called the “Sutton Place Park”. It’s a nice place to sit for a while and has a great view of the East River and the Queensboro (59th) Street Bridge.

It also has a fascinating statue of a Wild Boar. It’s cast in bronze and sits on a granite pedestal decorated with snakes, crabs, salamanders, and other creatures and it looked very familiar. Once upon a time, when I was working in Geneva, Switzerland I had to periodically go down to our office in Florence, Italy – I know its I hard life, but someone has to do it. I’d often walked past Pietro Tacca’s bronze Porcellino (“piglet”) statue, located in the heart of the city and more precisely near the Loggia del Mercato Nuovo, not far from Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria. Based on an ancient Greek marble original discovered in Rome in the 16th century, tourists like to rub its snout – it’s supposed to bring good luck.

The boar in Sutton Place Park is a copy of that replica, installed in 1972 was a gift from neighborhood philanthropist, Hugh Trumbull Adams, a descendent of the colonial governor of Connecticut Jonathan Trumbull. Mr. Adams donated many public works of art to the city including the Armillary Sphere located at the pocket park further south on 54th Street and the bronze Peter Pan statue at Carl Schurz Park, about 30 blocks north along the East River.

If you follow the link above, you’ll see that there’s startling wrinkle to this story:

In August 1999, Peter Pan disappeared. In a widely reported act of vandalism, the statue was dislodged from its base, to be subsequently recovered by the New York Police Department from the bottom of the East River. There were no suspects, indeed, as Parks Commissioner Stern said at the time, “We thought his only enemy was Captain Hook.” Celia Lipton Farris, a British actress who had played Peter Pan on the stage, contributed funds toward the restoration and more secure reinstallation of the sculpture in 1999.

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Taken with a Sony RX10 IV.

Meeting Alexander in New York City for dinner – East River Roundabout

by Posted in Sculpture Leave a comment
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Located in Manhattan on the shore of the East River at the base of the Queensboro Bridge, this pavilion and sculptural installation were designed to stand out amidst the high-density urban environment that surrounds them. The site was used for decades by the Sanitation Department as a waste transfer station until 1985 when the station was decommissioned and an eighteen-story hotel was proposed. A consortium of organizations including the Greenacre Foundation, the Parks Council, and the Municipal Arts Society protested the commercial development. Eventually the hotel project was abandoned and a public pavilion was commissioned. Funded by nearby Rockefeller University and the Hospital for Special Surgery, it was designed by landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, who had been involved in the protest, and sculptor Alice Aycock.

The exterior of the transfer station was removed, exposing its steel superstructure. A fence resembling a ship’s railings was installed along the section of the pavilion overlooking the river. Light blue benches and decorative paving were inserted in the 12,000-square-foot open-air pavilion. In 1995 Aycock’s 80-foot-long aluminum helix was dedicated, funded by public donations and maintained by the Municipal Art Society. Spiraling through the pavilion’s superstructure and reminiscent of a rollercoaster, East River Roundabout includes a curving roof that resembles a folded fan. Accessible from 60th Street via a pedestrian ramp to the elevated Bobby Wagner Walk, the park is adjacent to the 24 Sycamores Playground and the Andrew Haswell Green Park.

For more information see here.

Taken with a Sony RX10 IV.

Meeting Alexander in New York City for dinner – A couple of statues

by Posted in Black & White, Statues Leave a comment
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These two statues stand in the UN garden. I still have a UN retiree pass so I could have gone inside to take a picture. But I couldn’t be bothered. I rather like as seen from First Avenue.

The larger of the two is called Good Defeats Evil:

Good Defeats Evil is a bronze sculpture by Soviet/Russian painter and sculptor Zurab Tsereteli (1934 – ) who is well-known for large structures.

Seen here is a human defeating a dragon (you can’t see it in the picture), as in the story of Saint George and the Dragon. The tale tells of St. George slaying a dragon that demanded sacrifices from nearby villagers. Once the villagers ran out of livestock, they offered humans and when a well-loved princess was selected to be sacrificed, the saint rescues the lady. Here we have a new interpretation of the story.

An allegorical St. George, astride a rearing horse, drives his lance through a dragon. The dragon is not the mythological beast of early Christian tradition, but rather represents the vanquishing of nuclear war through the historic treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States. Created as a monument to peace, the sculpture is composed of parts of actual United States and Soviet missiles. Accordingly, the dragon is shown lying amid actual fragments of these weapons, the broken pieces of Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing missiles.  

The sculpture was unveiled on the 5th of October 1990 in a ceremony attended by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (1930 – ), Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze (1928 – 2014), UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar (1920 – 2020) and the artist, Zurab Tsereteli.

The sculpture commemorates the 1987 signing of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Missiles (INF Treaty) and was given in celebration of the 45 Session of the General Assembly in 1990.

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The other, the smaller looking one to the right in the first picture), is, I think the Peace Statue. IF so, it’s actually much larger than it appears in the picture. The Science Times had this to say about it:

The United Nation’s symbol of peace can be seen at its headquarters in New York City. The massive monument features a woman riding a horse with an olive branch in one hand, symbolically leading the nations toward peace.

The Peace Monument is revered as a significant peace symbol at the UN’s main office. The sculpture’s 33-foot-high pedestal is built of marble from the Croatian island of Bra, and it was produced in bronze in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1954.

Antun Augustinčić, a well-known Croatian sculptor, produced the sculpture. The monument was created and erected in 1954 by Yugoslavia, a country then, in front of the UN building in New York. The nation tasked Augustini with carrying out this concept because it wished to present the UN with a gift highlighting its dedication to maintaining international peace.

He proposed a statue of an equestrian that represents world peace. Augustinčić added, “peace would be far better protected if the decision rested with women instead of men.” As for the use of the horse, a war animal, the artist said that he opted to use it because “We must fight for peace.”

The artist visited New York in 1952 to select the monument’s site. Architect Wallace K. Harrison, the Director of Planning for the UN Headquarters, and Augustinčić agreed that the memorial should be erected in front of the General Assembly building alongside the northern entrance, where hundreds of visitors pass daily. However, the newly elected UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, reportedly disagreed and changed the monument’s location. Hammarskjöld wanted it to be installed at the end of the big lawn close to the East River, about 200 meters away from the place originally agreed, which the artist had in mind when he added the final touches to the monument.

Augustin was shocked by the decision, which he found to be exceedingly uncomfortable, but the monument was moved despite his objections. The memorial was eventually placed 40 meters away from the original place. However, even though the monument had greater space at the new location, Augustinčić’s concept of the monument’s organic relationship to the General Assembly building was lost.

The Peace Monument was unveiled on Dec. 2, 1954. UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, chairman of the Ninth UN General Assembly Eelco Van Klefens, and Head of the Yugoslav Permanent Mission to the UN, Dr. Jože Brilej, were present at the ceremony. Artist Augustinčić could not attend because he was working on a new project, Monument to the Victims of Fascism, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Taken with a Sony RX10 IV.