Panel Looking To Tear Down Controversial NYC Statues Leaves Public Out Of Debate

NEW YORK CITY — A panel tasked with deciding the fate of New York City's controversial landmarks has yet to list all the monuments it's looking at — or give the public any say at all.

The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers held its first meeting behind closed doors on Tuesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed the body last month after plans to remove a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia caused white supremacists and anti-racist counter-protesters to clash.

In a joint statement, the commission's chairmen said that meeting was "an important step" in what they called a "thoughtful community conversation" about long-controversial landmarks.

But it's unclear what statues the 18-member commission is reviewing or how many. Those decisions will be up to the panel, Grybauskas said Friday. And, so far, the public has been completely left out of the discussion.

The group's "formal meetings are not open to press or the public," city spokeswoman Natalie Grybauskas told Patch in an email. The chairmen, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and city Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, pledged to release a schedule of public meetings and a survey on the issue "in the coming days"– but as of Sunday none has come.

(For more on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

When he created it last month, de Blasio said the panel would review "a select few items, including pieces that have been the subject of significant public discussion," over 90 days.

So far, the mayor has only identified the Christopher Columbus statue at Columbus Circle, a marker in the Financial District honoring French Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain – which was actually removed last month – and a Central Park monument to J. Marion Sims, an early gynecologist who conducted medical experiments on enslaved black women.

At an unrelated press conference Thursday, de Blasio said Tuesday's meeting marked "just the beginning of a longer process." The commission is "dealing with very sensitive, complex subject matter," he said.

"They’re going to seek out the voices of New Yorkers and then come up with, at least, the beginning of a vision of how we move forward as a city universally," he said.

The commission has taken up one of the most charged issues in the city and across the U.S. The violence at the Virginia white supremacist rally in August put momentum behind efforts to remove Confederate monuments, which activists say venerate slavery and racism.

Some 23 cities nationwide have removed Confederate monuments, according to an August review by The New York Times. Among them were two plaques honoring Robert E. Lee in Brooklyn.

"Public sculptures and monuments have sparked intense debates stretching back decades," Walker and Finkelpearl said in their joint statement. "Monuments are lasting embodiments of our city and nation’s people. Our goal is to make our public landscape more reflective of that rich and complicated history."

Though their fate remains uncertain, statues honoring other controversial figures have sparked new debate since the Charlottesville violence. Native American activists say the Columbus Circle monument is a harmful reminder of a conquerer who committed genocide, but Italian-Americans defend it as a cultural touchstone symbolizing their place in American history.

Including the monument in the commission's review led de Blasio to be booed at this week's Columbus Day parade.

Advocates of different political stripes said the commission could be doing more outreach even in the early stages of its work.

"The commission owes it to New Yorkers to live up to their promise of an open, fair and accessible process," Doug Kellogg, a spokesman for the conservative good-government group Reclaim New York, said in an email. "The people should be the ones driving these decisions, not politicians and political agendas."

Cliff Matias, the director of the Sunset Park-based Redhawk Native American Arts Council, said the panel could be asking Native people for their opinions on the issue. It should also educate New Yorkers on the history behind the statues, he said, such as the historical records documenting Columbus' cruel treatment of people in the Caribbean.

"I think it’s really important that they make sure that there’s information for people," Matias told Patch.

(Lead image: A statue of J. Marion Sims, a surgeon known as the father of modern gynecology, is seen at Central Park on Aug. 23. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)