Existing comment:
Monuments in Bryant Park
An "outdoor museum" of public art works
(18) The William Cullen Bryant Memorial, a tribute, like the name of the park itself, to one of the most important New Yorkers of the nineteenth century, is a bronze by Herbert Adams - one of the best New York sculptors of his period. Thomas Hastings, an architect of the New York Public Library, designed the marble setting. Bryant (1794-1878) was a poet, newspaper owner and editor, and a civic reformer.
(17) The bronze of the American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), just to the west of the Bryant Memorial, was created in 1923 by the New York-born sculptor, Jo Davidson. Donated to the park in 1992, the statue is a cast made from the original, which is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
(16) On the south side of the park is a bronze bust of the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), by Karl Fischer, who created the bust in the year Goethe died. The Goethe Club of New York purchased it in 1876 and donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which in turn donated it to Bryant Park in 1932, the centennial of the writer's death.
(19) Master sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze statue of William Earle Dodge (1805-83) on the north side of the park, was one of the first in the city to honor a local citizen. Dodge was a businessman (Phelps, Dodge & Co., Native American rights activist, and philanthropist, who helped found the Y.M.C.A. in America. Originally dedicated in Herald Square on October 22, 1885, the statue was moved here in 1941.
(15) Dedicated in 1912, the pink granite Josephine Shaw Lowell Memorial Fountain by Charles Adams Platt, an authority on Italian Renaissance gardens and fountains, was the city's first public memorial to a woman. Social worker Lowell (1843-1905) founded the Charity Organization Society in 1882.
(21) Overlooking Avenue of the Americas is a bronze statue of Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva (1763-1838), by Jose Otavio Correia Lima. Dedicated in 1955, the statue was a gift from the people of Brazil when Sixth Avenue was renamed and conceived in the spirit of pan-American cooperation. Andrada, a leader in the Brazilian fight for independence from Portugal, became Brazil's first prime minister.
(20) Just to the north of Andrada, also on the Avenue of the Americas, is bronze statue of Benito Juarez (1806-1872), by Moises Cabrera Orozco. Juarez, a beloved Mexican President, is the first Mexican to be commemorated with a city monument. The statue was a gift from the Mexican State of Oaxaca to the City of New York and was dedicated on October 9, 2004. |