Boxed In: Christopher Columbus Entombed in Philadelphia
In the summer of 2020, as protestors marched in defense of Black lives, in support of defunding the police, and in desire for a political reckoning, statues commemorating the nation’s ongoing settler colonial and racial violence were debated, defaced, and toppled. In South Philadelphia, one controversial statue suffered a unique fate: indefinite, public confinement in a plywood box.
The statue – a marble sculpture of Christopher Columbus by Emanuele Caroni - was funded by local Italian-Americans and the Columbus Monument Association in the late 19th century. Originally installed in Fairmount Park in 1876, the statue was relocated to Marconi Plaza during the city’s yearlong Bicentennial celebration one hundred years later. Named in honor of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, the park is located in a historically Italian-American neighborhood and hosts annual Columbus Day celebrations. (Figure 1).[1]
Figure 1. Christopher Columbus by Emanuele Caroni, Marconi Plaza, 1980. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith [LC-DIG-highsm-15405].
Since June 16, 2020, a wooden box has entombed the statue of Columbus. For months, the box was guarded by a police officer and surrounded by metal barricades. The barricades were installed during conflicts beginning in early June 2020, when statue defenders armed with automatic weapons, baseball bats, and golf clubs gathered around Columbus, believing the sculpture would be vandalized. They were soon joined by protestors and onlookers, drawn both to the statue itself and the spectacle of a growing group of people guarding it. Some defenders attacked protestors as arguments intensified over a two week period. Statue defenders, protestors, neighbors, and local politicians sought out the largely absent mayor, Jim Kenney, while pleading for city leadership to act (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Constructing the Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, June 16, 2020. Police congregate in the foreground as workers build a plywood box around the Columbus statue. Protestors and statue defenders crowd the sidewalk beyond the barricades. All snapshots by the author.
Ultimately, the Kenney Administration voiced support for removing the statue, deemed a public safety risk, before tossing responsibility to the city’s Historical Commission and Art Commission. In August 2020, the Art Commission voted to remove the statue, put it into storage, and potentially relocate it. One year later, on August 17, 2021, however, Judge Paula Patrick determined that the city has no legal right to remove the statue. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office noted that the city is considering appealing the decision, adding that, for now, the statue will remain in its box (Figure 3). The seemingly permanent installation of the box at Marconi Plaza raises a provocative question: what does it mean to see the box not only as a municipal solution to complex struggles around the politics of public art and space, but as a monument in its own right (Figure 4)?
Figure 3. Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, April 24, 2021.
“What does it mean to see the box not only as a municipal solution to complex struggles around the politics of public art and space, but as a monument in its own right?”
Figure 4. Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, December 16, 2021. In this photograph, barricades are still visible behind a Christmas tree, protecting the box eighteen months after protests subsided. By separating the box from the surrounding park, the persistent barricades call attention to its significance as a precious, towering monument. At the same time, they direct visitors’ movements through Marconi Plaza, placing the guarded box at the center of a transformed landscape.
Approaching the box from any direction, the park visitor is confronted by a large, official sign, installed by the City of Philadelphia, explaining:
The Christopher Columbus statue has been a source of controversy in Philadelphia and across our country. Many are calling for the removal of the statue. The City understands their concerns and will be initiating a process for the Art Commission to review the statue, its location, and its appropriateness in a public park. We are committed to listening to all and moving forward in the best way to heal our deep divides. The boxing is to preserve the statue while the Art Commission process is followed. No decision has been made on whether the City will remove the statue.
Figure 5. Christopher Columbus Statue Box, with Posted Messages and Garbage, Marconi Plaza, June 13, 2021.
The multiple signs act as plaques, announcing the City’s position: “no decision.” And yet, the box is a decision. The box hides the statue from view, rather than removing it. The box is bound to an official process of “healing” that has moved into the dimly lit halls of municipal bureaucracy and stalled. The box memorializes this collapsed “healing” process, commemorates a void of meaningful leadership, and monumentalizes the absence of a clear plan for a more inclusive public landscape (Figure 5).
As a monument in and of itself, the box also invites dialogue about the statue and park’s future to continue in a different form. An ever-rotating array of ephemera marks the plywood container as a sort of shrine or platform for announcements and opinions (Figure 6).
Flags, t-shirts, wreaths, posters, and banners decorate the box’s immediate landscape. Most messages shared near the box are decidedly pro-Columbus and many feature the same handwriting. Rebuttals are infrequent; signs disappear in days or weeks, destroyed by the elements or removed, possibly in a quiet act of protest. The stalwart, anonymous writer often provides updates about the box alongside blended historical and political opinions (Figure 7).
Figure 6. Board with Messages Leaning Against the Fence Surrounding the Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, April 24, 2021. Messages critique Mayor Kenney, assert public ownership of the statue, and present a historical narrative marked by statements such as “FACT: Columbus Never Owned Slaves.”
Figure 7. Posted Messages at Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, November 15, 2021. The large poster, on the right, features a printed image of Judge Patrick above the words “Brave,” “Honest,” “Wise,” and “Beautiful,” and adjacent to an excerpt from her ruling. The poster on the left announces "1492 2021 529 YRS. NO PROJECT REAL DEAL" and is surrounded by additional commentary on the ruling and its meaning. Dying flowers and an additional faded sign are also visible.
The mysterious Columbus devotee occasionally reminds park visitors that although the city may own the box, the people own the statue. In 1979, three years after it was moved to Marconi Plaza, the statue was beaten with a baseball bat. Columbus sported a missing left forearm and several missing right fingers for months.[2] The peoples’ ownership, then, includes both the statue’s creation and destruction (Figure 8).
Contemporary conflicts around Columbus statues in other cities, like New Haven, illustrate the complexity of public ownership in practice. In late June 2020, while Marconi Plaza’s Columbus sat in a freshly constructed box, in New Haven’s historically Italian-American Wooster Square, a statue of Columbus was alternately guarded and doused with red paint. Although the statue was ultimately removed and placed in storage, during the height of debate, it remained within the public’s grasp, for both protection and destruction (Figure 9).
“The peoples’ ownership, then, includes both the statue’s creation and destruction.”
Figure 8. Signs on the Barricades Surrounding the Christopher Columbus Statue Box, June 21, 2020. These signs may have been left behind after protests and violent confrontations, which ended close to the same date. The signs read, “Leave Columbus Alone” and “Stop Trying to Erase Western Civilization! Teach ALL of History!”
Figure 9. New Haven’s Christopher Columbus Statue is Removed from Wooster Square, June 2020. Cloe Poisson / CTMirror.org, used with permission.
By forming a weathered plywood barrier, the box complicates, denies, and obscures public ownership but does not fully sever it. It does not offer a solution to the public; as it hides the statue, it mirrors municipal leadership’s attempts to hide from the public’s demands. As debates about monuments and memorials in public space continue, the box, as monument, offers an instructive lesson for decision-makers across the nation: attempts to hide are doomed to fail. At Marconi Plaza, the three ships adorning the fence, the city’s four official signs, and the constantly rotating ephemera invite passersby to imagine what the box conceals. Although the statue itself is no longer visible, the box now sits at the center of an installation in which Columbus is kaleidoscopic (Figure 10).
Figure 10. Christopher Columbus Statue Box, Marconi Plaza, December 13, 2020. The barricades are adorned with American flags and laminated messages from the city, which hang upside down.
Notes
[1] There is also a statue of Marconi on the eastern side of Marconi Plaza, facing Columbus. Although Marconi actively supported Mussolini’s anti-Semitic, fascist regime, the statue did not receive any attention during the summer’s protests and has been neither protected nor attacked.
[2] “Tipoff: Statue’s Blues,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1979
Citation
Hankin, Kristin, “Boxed In: Christopher Columbus entombed in Philadelphia” PLATFORM, December 20, 2021.
