What our ultra-progressive mayor should do about contentious statues
Zohran Mamdani has revealed little about where culture fits into his agenda. Monuments offer one test of the Democratic Socialist’s willingness to listen to moderate voices, a trait for which he was praised on the campaign trail.
Although it looms smaller in the public mind than the cost of living and public safety, art in the public realm matters in New York City. It gives our common spaces beauty and character and gives us as people a story to tell about ourselves. As such, murals and public sculpture have been priorities for mayors since Greater New York’s establishment in 1898. Mayor Robert Van Wyck oversaw their realization for new courthouses, libraries and museums. Seth Low and George B. McClellan Jr. commissioned them as symbols of honest, efficient municipal government. Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner, Robert Lindsay, Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg all recognized art’s role as a vehicle for community affirmation and economic development.
Things went sour under Mamdani’s progressive predecessor Bill de Blasio, whom Mamdani has called his favorite living mayor. In 2020, a Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers put portrait statuary on trial for allegedly representing racial injustices. Statues of obstetrician and cancer surgeon J. Marion Sims (installed in 1894) and President Theodore Roosevelt (1940) were sacrificial lambs. The Sims was carted off from Central Park to Green-Wood Cemetery. The American Museum of Natural History, the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Public Design Commission oversaw the dismantling of the Roosevelt monument in 2022, at a cost of some $2 million. Both monuments are presently in storage.
The gargantuan Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle was also in the crosshairs, escaping removal partly because of opposition from Italian Americans de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Iconoclastic crusades under de Blasio focused narrowly on the perceived transgressions of the subjects and on how the sight of a public monument made people feel, even though they often came to the experience with little familiarity with the intricate backstories. A broader range of historical perspectives, supplied to the Mayoral Commission from the get-go, could have provided a more nuanced and educational platform for both internal discussions and ensuing hearings.
Mamdani jumped on the negative bandwagon. A 2020 photograph of him flipping the bird at Angelo Racioppi’s 1941 Columbus monument in Astoria hints at what could be in store — a return to the sanctimonious attempts to scour the city for statues that offend one constituency or another and take down those deemed out of step with current liberal mores. (Cuomo called out Mamdani for this gesture in both mayoral debates.)
Mamdani might be tempted to take a “tear it down” route to controversial statues as mayor. This tack would surely rile up a president eager to do battle over progressive cultural causes. Would a renewed battle over statuary be worth it?
Nobody is suggesting Mamdani should suddenly become the city’s biggest Columbus fan, or not offer his opinions about the merits of his effigy. But disapproval need not lead naturally to erasure. A better approach would be to support the twinned ideals of education and preservation with the same fervor that some earlier mayors did.
He should start by coming to appreciate how monuments are distinctive urban artifacts with a colorful life patina. Quite apart from the subjects portrayed, and the ways in which formal and spatial aspects augment those meanings, the stories of patronage and process surrounding their realization tell us volumes about the times in which they emerged. In this regard, the art objects are historical exemplars of how officials navigate obstacles daily to make government work. They embody principles like those at the heart of Mamdani’s platform. Monuments represent successful outcomes of negotiations among patrons, residents and municipal bureaucracies. The statues have significance on that basis alone.
Each and every monument represents purpose, planning and effort. Bygone New Yorkers invested emotion, time and money to honor a cause significant to them. Those motivations should be investigated dispassionately within the biographical, social and political contexts in which they unfolded. Regardless of whether a memorial meets today’s standards of social acceptability, if it was officially accepted, it’s part of the City’s collection and heritage. The notion of removal should not be entertained lightly. In extreme cases, such as if a Confederate general is being exalted in the town square of a Southern city, a thumb in the eye of its current Black population, it might make sense to have a dialogue about relocating a statue. The vast majority of cases are not that clear-cut, however. What statues — even those that might rub some of today's New Yorkers the wrong way — can teach us overrides any harm they can do to us.
With these facts in mind, the mayor should in good conscience promote actively the work of research and preservation that agencies like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (specifically, its Department of Arts and Antiquities), the Public Design Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs (Percent for Art Program) have done under the radar for years now, often in collaboration with private entities. These agencies have evolved strategies for outreach, edification, deflection and physical protection. They shepherd in new projects while keeping old ones intact.
The 1892 Columbus at Columbus Circle is a case in point. A hub of ethnic and planning politics since inception, its meanings extend far beyond the symbolic reputation of its subject and the objectives of its sponsors.
The Bloomberg administration understood that any assessment of the statue’s vice or virtue had to address its multifaceted significance. In 2012, partnering with the nonprofit Public Art Fund, it mounted the economic development spectacle “Discovering Columbus,” an elaborate installation with Columbus at its center. The exhibition explored both the checkered Columbus legacy and the New York City story of this monument. It also had a preservation component: conservation of the entire granite, bronze and marble art structure, underwritten by the Fund and implemented by the Parks Department. Long before the 2020 reckoning and removal movements, the Bloomberg people took a productive, mildly avant-garde course of action, then went back to business.
The New York City way with public art is typically laissez-faire — except when it comes to upkeep, if Art and Antiquities and the Public Design Commission have anything to do with it.
“Discovering Columbus” was atypical in its scale, if not in its ambition to protect and enlighten. More routinely, Arts and Antiquities cares for over 800 monuments and plaques, with the Public Design Commission as backup. Some of that burden is taken up by summer conservation apprentices, overseen by Parks staff. These same administrators help fundraise to pay for this work. They also fend off persistent hordes who seek to bestow statues upon parks of their choice. Central Park’s typically preferred, with an assumption that the City will take on upkeep. Department gatekeepers also dispatch antigraffiti squads at the first sighting of red paint splashed a monument’s way. On the side, Arts and Antiquities organizes temporary exhibitions in parks citywide and displays in its Arsenal Gallery.
In summer 2025, Parks’ in-house team conserved Henry Shrady’s commanding 1906 equestrian George Washington at Valley Forge at the Brooklyn entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. The agency’s ongoing battle to preserve the monument in the face of repeated assaults from vandals and skateboarders is a heartening example of City government’s refusal to surrender to entropy.
New York City’s public art cannot just fix itself. The Washington, along with Tony Smith’s rotating Alamo in Astor Place and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial in Riverside Park (its $60 million of repairs now finally underway), are merely three cases that show the deterioration that invariably sets in. Maintenance endowments and active support from City officials are crucial to deter it.
Spawned by ignorance and neglect, the decay of City art is a palpable, demoralizing sign of municipal failure. Ask Bronx residents who witnessed the decline of the Lorelei Fountain (Heinrich Heine Memorial) in the Bronx’s Joyce Kilmer Park and celebrated its 1999 restoration by Parks and the “Adopt-A-Monument” program of the Municipal Art Society. Today, newlyweds pose for photos with the fountain as a backdrop. The revitalization of this and other monuments instills joy and pride in place citywide.
Mamdani should follow this inspiring lead, one consistent with his vision of an administration that will deliver on its promise to provide basic services to all. He should actively back municipal agencies that have worked extensively to preserve, through public sculpture, the city’s past and present-day vitality. Rather than giving the finger to monuments, he can learn from the complex urban lessons that they have to impart. He can affirm a commitment to an established bureaucratic process for creating and reviewing civic art — not lean into the idea that this ought to be a politician’s job.
By celebrating the City’s vast collection of artworks, the mayor can quietly but pointedly undercut the misguided premises for the Trump administration’s National Garden of American Heroes concept. In affirming that the biographical, local, state and national dimensions of New York City monuments’ histories are part and parcel of their significance, Mamdani can beat the president at his own game. He need only declare that the Big Apple’s government has cultivated hero monuments for the American people over a prolonged period of time. He can boast, in fact, that the city of Trump’s birthplace did it first, did it right and did it better, aesthetically and procedurally. It’s a worthy cause for this mayor to consider.