Mayor de Blasio’s five-month odyssey to center the national debate over removing controversial monuments on New York City ended with a whimper on Thursday after officials announced that just one statue would be moved — from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The 18-member panel of experts whose commissioning led to protests and rallies over long-gone historical figures ended up focusing on just four public monuments — with controversial 1800s gynecologist Dr. J. Marion Sims being the lone figure to get the boot.
His Central Park monument will be moved to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he’s buried.
Monuments and markers to controversial explorer Christopher Columbus, French Nazi collaborator Henri Philippe Petain and former US President Theodore Roosevelt were also eyed for removal — but all three will stay put, with clarifying historical information to be added.
While a number of panelists recommended tossing the explorer from his midtown perch in Columbus Circle over his ties to genocide and the slave trade, it was Roosevelt who came closer to getting yanked from outside the American Museum of Natural History because half the body wanted him gone.
That group pointed to his statue’s connections to racial hierarchy and eugenics, but with the vote split the panel left it up to de Blasio — who granted Teddy a reprieve.
Columbus, whose potential removal sparked significant blowback against de Blasio from the Italian-American community, will be joined by a large-scale monument to indigenous peoples — potentially in nearby Central Park, officials said.
“Reckoning with our collective histories is a complicated undertaking with no easy solution. Our approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to – instead of removing entirely – the representations of these histories,” said de Blasio. “And we’ll be taking a hard look at who has been left out and seeing where we can add new work to ensure our public spaces reflect the diversity and values of our great city.”
It was the mayor who launched the entire brouhaha by tweeting in mid-August that he would form a commission and that Petain’s marker — a nameplate on the sidewalk along Broadway — “will be one of the first we remove.”
He later claimed the tweet was botched by his staff and didn’t reflect his stance.
The commission on Thursday ruled that the 206 markers in the “Canyon of Heroes” should remain for historical accuracy, including Petain’s.
“The Commission believes that if a marker is accurate, and not celebratory of egregious values or actions, it should not be removed,” the panel’s 42-page report says.
The mayor did not embrace the panel’s accompanying recommendation that references to the name “Canyon of Heroes” be scrubbed from downtown.
One panel member, Harry Belafonte — easily the highest-profile member of de Blasio’s commission — took only one meeting to decide the enterprise wasn’t worth his time.
The singer and civil rights icon — a strong supporter of the mayor — described the meeting he attended as “superficial,” but declined to detail what was discussed.
“I did not participate in it much,” he told The Post. “There were a lot of things I could have suggested and done, but none of it would have been worth the time to go through it all.”
Panel member Harriet Senie, an art history director at City College of New York, conceded that “not much has changed” after the panel met three times, held five town halls attended by 500 people, and surveyed an additional 3,000 folks.
“It was very, very challenging, but it was probably done as well as it could be,” said Senie, who blamed the lack of more action on the divergent opinions held by members of the commission.
The panel also made a slew of recommendations for how to judge which historical figures are monument-worthy going forward, and which additional statues should be subjected to review for removal.
The works of art on public property that merit attention include those with at least two years of negative public reaction, opposition from a local community board or figures whose reputations are challenged by new information.
City officials said there was no cost to taxpayers for the initiative, as panelists received no subsidies or reimbursement for travel.