![]() ![]() Eno, a New York businessman who worked with Frederick Law Olmsted on the creation of Central Park.But the rest of Columbus Circle would be as unrecognizable to George Hearst as the current Hearst Company headquarters on West 57th Street, where British architect Norman Foster's forty-two story glass tower with its shiny metal, diagonal grids now looms over the old, six-story Hearst building designed by Joseph Urban.Taking up the entire west side of Columbus Circle on the site where Robert Moses' massive New York Coliseum once sat is David Childs's Time-Warner Center, a mixed-use project with two 750-foot, dark class towers that, in addition to Time Warner's offices, contains the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, CNN studios, and Raphael Vinoly's Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. The center of Columbus Circle-the point at which distances from New York are measured-continues to be dominated by Gaetano Russo's statue, and around the statue, cars follow an expanded version of the traffic circle completed in 1905 by William P. We "dedicate a monument that shall stand in this metropolis in the country, and in one of the greatest and busiest marts in the world," the orator of the day, former president William Howard Taft, declared.Today the Maine statue stands in the same place it always has. Those on the reviewing stand at the Central Park plaza included the governor of New York, New York City's mayor, and the commander-in-chief of the Atlantic fleet. Fifteen years earlier, his father, newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, had popularized the slogan "Remember the Maine" as a way of ginning up support for war with Spain over the blowing up of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor.The 1913 ceremony was preceded by one of the greatest Memorial Day parades ever witnessed in New York, and as the Maine monument was unveiled, battleships from the Atlantic fleet, anchored in the Hudson River, fired their guns in a salute timed to coincide with the playing of the National Anthem. ![]() The choice of George Hearst for an honor normally reserved for the famous was no accident. Eleven years after the dedication of Russo's statue, Columbus Circle got a second important statue when in 1913 nine-year-old George Hearst, wearing the white dress uniform of an enlisted sailor, unveiled the monument to the battleship Maine in Columbus Circle by pulling the silken cord on the giant American flag covering Attilio Piccirill's statue of Columbia Triumphant driving a seashell chariot. The dedication of statue, which then as now rests on a 70-foot granite column, was an important moment for New York's Italian immigrants, but this Columbus Day an equally good reason for taking note of Russo's work is that it calls attention to the remarkable transformation that Columbus Circle has undergone in recent years and the planning and architectural battles that have brought it to its present state. ![]() The statue, paid for by New York's Italian-American community, with subscriptions raised by Il Progresso, the city's largest foreign-language newspaper, had reached America with great fanfare a month earlier aboard the Italian naval transport Garigliano. On that day 10,000 people gathered at Eighth Avenue and 59th Street to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America by dedicating a statue to the explorer designed by the Italian sculptor Gaetano Russo. New York has never had a Columbus Day like October 12, 1892. ![]()
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