Survey Seeks New Yorkers' Thoughts On Controversial Statues

NEW YORK CITY — Should they stay or should they go? Starting Wednesday, the public can help decide the fate of controversial statues that a city commission is considering tearing down.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers launched an online survey Wednesday morning asking New Yorkers for their thoughts on how to handle specific statues and the broader role of such monuments in public spaces. The survey is open until Nov. 26.

Survey responses will figure into the commission's 90-day review of a handful of landmarks considered symbols of oppression. De Blasio impaneled the commission last month following violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the planned removal of Confederate monuments, which anti-racist activists view as odes to human slavery.

"Responses will play a critical role in shaping commission’s work of developing guidelines that can be applied broadly to art on City property, with the ultimate goal of putting forth a thoughtful way to promote more inclusive, welcoming public spaces for all New Yorkers," city Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, one of the panel's co-chairmen, said in a statement.

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The commission's 18 members will receive summaries of survey feedback as they consider whether to remove the landmarks, otherwise modify them or leave them alone, a spokesman for the Department of Cultural Affairs said. The New York Daily News first reported the survey's launch.

The commission has so far held only one closed-door meeting. The panel promised the survey and a series of public forums two weeks ago, but have yet to announce when or where those forums will be held. Feedback from the survey will help inform those forums, the spokesman said.

The commission has yet to disclose which specific landmarks it's reviewing, but most recent public debate has focused on the monument to Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle. De Blasio has said the panel is looking at that statue, as well as one in Central Park of J. Marion Sims, an early gynecologist who experimented on enslaved black women; and a plaque in the Financial District honoring Philippe Pétain, a French military leader who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Creating the commission was de Blasio's way of dealing with a national debate about how to deal with monuments of once-revered historical figures who are now abhorrent in the public eye.

"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 earlier this month.

Some 23 cities nationwide have removed monuments to Confederate leaders who supported slavery, according to an August review by The New York Times, including two plaques honoring Robert E. Lee in Brooklyn.

His decision to review the Columbus statue has drawn ire and boos from Italian-Americans, for whom Columbus is still an important cultural and ethnic symbol. Native American activists and others, though, say there should be no place to venerate an explorer who attempted genocide against indigenous people in the Caribbean and was notorious for his torturous tactics.

You can fill out the commission's survey here.

(Lead image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)