Firemen's Memorial: OMOM Essay 45

In "About the Sculpture" I examine how the bronze relief and two groups of marble figures combine to make a vivid statement about the excitement and hazards of firefighting. Then I suggest that the reader imagine how extraordinarily inexpressive this memorial would be were it only a list of names. In my Battery Park podcast, I argue (with additional examples) that for any memorial, including the World Trade Center memorial, representational sculpture is more evocative than a list of names set in landscape architecture.

"About the Subject" surveys major fires in New York from 1776, when Nathan Hale (Essay 8 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan) was arrested as a possible arsonist, until 1908, when the death of a 35-year-veteran of the New York Fire Department inspired the creation of this memorial.

For the Sidebar it amused me to use a few lines from my favorite song from The Scarlet Pimpernel in a very literal sense.

Below: the Vitruvian wave is usually a simple running spiral, but on the Firemen's Memorial, flame and smoke lick its edges.

Maine Monument: OMOM Essay 34

In "About the Sculpture" I wanted to stress that a work that's difficult to grasp, for example a complex allegorical sculpture such as the Maine Monument, can be very expressive once you understand it. Thinking this point would be more obvious in a verbal comparison, I amused myself by skimming all Shakespeare's sonnets while trying to recall mundane pop-music lyrics that expressed the same sentiments.

In "About the Subject" of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan I delve into why the USS Maine was moored in Havana harbor and why investigators were unable to determine the cause of the explosion that blew her apart in February 1898. My out-takes file (some of which I'll eventually upload here or on the Forgotten Delights site) includes a gruesome description by one of the divers of the underwater investigation. If you're impatient, read Charles Morgan's account now.

The Forgotten Delights calendar shows a close-up of Columbia Triumphant (i.e., the United States) from the top of the Maine Monument, next to an excerpt from Badger Clark's "The Westerner," one of Ayn Rand's favorite poems.