The Firefighters Memorial
A bronze memorial to the 343 New York City firefighters who lost their lives on September 11 has become a place of quiet pilgrimage for Americans, similar to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They will come to remember what former mayor Rudy Giuliani called the worst day in the history of the city, for the tragedy we suffered, but also its greatest day, for the response of New Yorkers to that tragedy.
I have not yet had a chance to see it in person, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, one can get a pretty good look at it from the comfort of home. The memorial is vast, 6 feet high, 56 feet long, and weighing 7,000 pounds. It was modeled, in a way, after Trajan's column in Rome, a bas relief that tells the story of two of the emperor's campaigns. But emotionally it reminds me more of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's immortal Shaw memorial in Boston.
It also reminds me, because of its size and location, of another bronze memorial that, like Trajan's column, was meant to record triumph, not tragedy. Also like Trajan's column, it was ordered by the man it celebrated. Unlike Trajan's column, it no longer exists.
This was the bronze high relief that Cornelius Vanderbilt erected to his own glory in 1869. Vanderbilt had bought once ultra-fashionable but by then much decayed St. Johns Park, at Hudson Street, south of Canal, to build a freight depot for his Hudson River Railroad. He decided to fill the pediment of the building, 31 feet high at its peak and 150 feet long at its base, with what amounted to a high relief autobiography in bronze, 100,000 pounds of it in all. In the center was a statue of the Commodore, twelve feet high and weighing four tons. On the right side were representations of his career in ships, on the left his career in railroads.
Opinions were sharply divided. The great diarist George Templeton Strong was appalled. Vanderbilt, he wrote, is a millionaire of millionaires. And therefore we bow down before him, and worship him, with a hideous group of molten images, with himself for a central figure, at a cost of $800,000. These be thy Gods, O Israel!
The New York Herald, the great newspaper of its day, begged to differ. The objection that this bronze is only a monument to the achievements of a private citizen is of no force, it noted; for in truth the bronze is a monument of the greatest material inventions and enterprises of the nineteenth century. In other words, this beautiful work is a monument of the genius and progress of the age . . . The Herald, fearing for the works long-term survival recommended moving it to Central Park, where, the paper thought, it would be safe.
The Herald was entirely correct. As residential St. Johns Park had given way to a railroad depot, so the depot gave way to the automobile and was torn down in the 1920s to make way for the Manhattan approaches to the Holland Tunnel. In the flood tide of reaction to all things Victorian, no one tried to preserve the Vanderbilt bronze, and it was melted down. Only the central statue survives, now located before the south facade of Grand Central Terminal.
