By Ashley M. Casey
Associate Editor
Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh announced Oct. 9 that the city will move the statue of Christopher Columbus from its current location off East Onondaga Street to a private location yet to be determined. Salina Town Councilors Nick Paro and David Carnie have suggested that Columbus make his next voyage to the hamlet of Lyncourt, an enclave of Italian American residents.
“I have had preliminary conversations with the supervisor and she is on board. No town funds would go toward the cost of moving the statue,” Paro told the Star-Review.
State Senate candidate Sam Rodgers issued a statement in support of Paro and Carnie’s quest to save the monument and possibly move it to Lyncourt.
“Not long before it was erected, Italian Americans were decried as sub-par citizens, even in local newspapers. No man or woman in history has maintained a spotless legacy. We celebrate Italian heritage with this Columbus statue not because he was perfect, but because, despite his imperfections, Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas was pivotal to creating the world in which we live,” Rodgers said. “I am thankful for their foresight and look forward to encouraging this process that would bring a historic Italian figure to a heavily populated Italian community.”
Ultimately, Paro and other Italian Americans in Central New York are hoping Walsh will change his mind and keep the statue in what is known as Columbus Circle, where the monument has stood since its 1934 unveiling.
Paro said the monument was built as a “symbolic apology for discrimination against Italian Americans.” In a 2019 article for the Onondaga Historical Association, OHA Associate Curator of History Robert Searing wrote, “In an era when Italian Americans were regularly labelled as seditious, subversive, dangerous, and ‘un-American,’ it was important to these men, all prominent members of Syracuse’s Italian community, to provide their community with a symbol of ethnic pride.”
The men of whom Searing writes bore names that are still prominent in CNY today: Ciciarelli, Pirro, Bennett, Pietrafesa. It took these Italian American community leaders nearly 25 years to make their dream of the monument a reality. In 1910, Syracuse University Prof. Torquato DeFelice met with sculptor V. Renzo Baldi in Florence, Italy, to discuss the possibility of building a monument to Columbus. In the years that followed, the Columbus Monument Association was born. Interrupted by World War I and its aftermath, the CMA resumed fundraising in earnest in 1927.
After much deliberation over where the monument would be located and squabbling within the CMA, construction began in 1932. Two years later, 20,000 people flocked to the former St. Mary’s Circle for the dedication of the monument, which includes a reflecting pool with a 30-foot pink granite obelisk topped with a 12-foot bronze sculpture of Columbus, bronze masks of Indigenous people (who resemble the nations of the Great Plains more than either the Onondaga, on whose homeland the statue is located, or the Taíno people Columbus encountered upon landing in the Bahamas), giant stone shells that once spouted water like the Trevi Fountain in Rome, and bronze plaques depicting scenes from Columbus’ voyage.
A symbol of unity?
But where many Italian Americans see a symbol of their heritage and culture, others see a monument that celebrates genocide, racism and oppression.
In his 2012 book “Columbus: The Four Voyages,” Laurence Bergreen writes that Columbus enslaved more than 1,100 Indigenous people, keeping 600 to work on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and sending 500 back to Spain. Only 300 of the Indigenous people sent to Spain survived the voyage.
According to historian John Boyd Thacher, Columbus wrote to a friend of the Spanish queen that Spanish settlers were selling young Indigenous girls into sexual slavery.
“There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid,” Columbus’ letter reads.
Bergreen writes that Columbus mistreated the Spanish settlers under his rule, punishing them for minor infractions with whippings, hangings and other brutal acts.
“He ordered a cabin boy’s hand nailed in public to the spot where he had pulled a trap from a river and caught a fish,” Bergreen writes.
These accounts are at odds with Columbus’ professed Christian faith. He wrote in his log in 1492, “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude to us because I know they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”
The rulers of Spain sent Francisco de Bobadilla to Hispaniola to arrest Columbus, and the explorer was brought back to Spain in chains.
Over the years, activists — Indigenous, Black, immigrant, citizen and otherwise — have held protests at the Syracuse monument, splashed red paint or tacked protest signs on the statue, and called for its removal.
The Onondaga Nation released a statement about the monument Aug. 12, two months before Walsh’s announcement.
“We fully understand the wishes of the Italian American community to honor their heritage, but it is burdensome for the people of Onondaga to see Christopher Columbus memorialized with a statue. Within our lands and hearts, finding equality and peace is difficult knowing the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign. Our own monuments, beautiful lakes, streams, rivers, and the earth itself, has suffered greatly as a direct result principle of the Doctrine of Discovery to which Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish crown,” the statement reads. “The Onondaga Nation does not wish anyone’s culture or heritage to be affronted in the manner ours have suffered; but to find a way to allow the space currently occupied by the Columbus statue to be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.”
‘A place of healing’
According to Walsh’s announcement, the city of Syracuse will revamp Columbus Circle into a “year-round education and learning site [that] will address the consequences of colonialism while celebrating the contributions of the Onondagas, Black and Brown Americans, immigrants to America and New Americans.”
“This space should be both a tribute to Italian Americans and a place of healing at which we celebrate our shared accomplishments,” said Walsh. “This decision is based on the fact that we can honor our Italian American community without focusing on a statue that has become the source of division over decades and overshadowed the original intent of the monument.”
The removal of the statue is an “attack on Italian Americans,” Paro said. Placing the statue in the context of Columbus’ voyages “detracts from the purpose” of the statue, he added. The monument is not about Columbus as an individual, but about celebrating Italian Americans, who suffered discrimination, stereotyping and even violence into the 20th century.
Paro said Indigenous people should be free to celebrate their own heritage with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
“I just don’t want them to tell an Italian American that we should not be able to celebrate Columbus Day,” Paro said.
Bob Gardino, secretary of the Columbus Monument Corporation, said the timing of Walsh’s announcement — just three days before the annual wreath-laying ceremony at the monument — was particularly painful.
“It’s very hurtful to contemplate it coming down,” Gardino said.
Gardino said the Columbus Monument Corporation is gearing up for a legal battle to keep the statue in Syracuse. He said several prominent Italian Americans in CNY have offered their support, and a GoFundMe campaign has been started to help defray legal expenses.
The city will have to navigate the site’s status in the National Register of Historic Places and clear the redesign with the New York State Historic Preservation Office, both Gardino and Walsh’s announcement noted. The Syracuse Public Art Commission and the Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board also must sign off on the plan.
The battle to protect the statue mirrors the monument’s beginnings, Gardino said.
“It was a war effort,” he “What we’re trying to do is replicate the fervor, the fever, the absolute assuredness we need to fight this. Our ancestors were involved in creating this.”
Gardino noted that representatives of the Onondaga Nation were present at the monument’s dedication in 1934 and bestowed an honorary headdress and name on Baldi, the sculptor.
“It’s tragic to see the younger generation of the Onondaga Nation attacking something their forefathers were part of,” he said.
While Walsh is hoping the reimagined — and eventually renamed — Columbus Circle can be a “place of healing,” SU professor Scott Stevens is not as optimistic. Stevens, a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, is the director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and an associate professor at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“I doubt such a public space could truly be a site of healing, as I have always viewed talk of ‘truth and reconciliation’ as lopsided when it comes to American history,” Stevens said in a statement dated Oct. 9. “But if the site were at least one of truth and recognition — in this case of our complicated and often conflicting relationships to one another’s respective communities — that would be a welcome change to a statue celebrating a figure who represents an ongoing cataclysm for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.”
