New York City has not one but two sculptures of Horace Greeley: one at City Hall (by John Quincy Adams Ward, 1890) and another at Herald Square (by Alexander Doyle, 1892).
Why did he rate two memorials?
Greeley made his name in publishing as founder (in 1841) and editor of the New York Tribune. The Tribune, known for its national and international reporting, featured such prominent writers as Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana and Karl Marx. Greeley’s editorials railed against slavery, poverty, suppression of women’s rights, capital punishment, tobacco, alcohol and marital infidelity, and promoted peace movements, vegetarianism, labor rights and high tariffs. Read any history of the Civil War, and you’re likely to come across Greeley's frequent, often contradictory exhortations to President Lincoln. Through the Tribune, Greeley became so well known and well liked that in 1872 he won 43% of the vote in the presidential election against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.
Here are his first impressions of New York, when he arrived on August 17, 1831: "New York was then about one third of her present size; but her business was not one fourth so great as now; and her real size - counting her suburbs, and considering the tens of thousands who find employment in and earn subsistence here, though sleeping outside of her chartered limits - was not one fifth that of 1867. No single railroad pointed toward her wharves. No line of ocean steamers brought passengers to her hotels, nor goods to her warehouses, from any foreign port. In the mercantile world, her relative rank was higher, but her absolute importance was scarcely greater, than that of Rio [de] Janeiro or San Francisco is today. Still, to my eyes, which had never till yesterday gazed on a city of even 20,000 inhabitants, nor seen a sea-going vessel, her miles square of mainly brick or stone houses, and her furlongs of masts and yards, afforded ample incitement to a wonder and admiration akin to awe."
Incidentally, Greeley didn’t say “Go west, young man,” although he did advise, “Do not lounge in the cities! There is room and health in the country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory.”
The Greeley at City Hall originally stood in a niche on the Tribune building near the Brooklyn Bridge. It and the Benjamin Franklin now in front of Pace University are reminders of the time when Park Row was Publishers Row.
Copyright © 2004 Dianne Durante. For more on outdoor sculpture in Manhattan, visit www.ForgottenDelights.com .
