And Some Things That Should Not Have Been Forgotten Were Lost

There used to be a statue of King George the III in Bowling Green in NYC. The statue was torn down July 9th, 1776 after the Declaration of Independence was read in City Hall Park. Troops from Washington's army ripped it off the plinth, as well as the crowns on the fence surrounding the park. The unadorned fence is still there but the plinth was left until the 1880s when it fell apart. (There's actually more to the story about the plinth, too, but I'm going to skip it.)

This story of the statue and the fence is one of the best known stories of the Revolutionary War in the city. I'm gonna have to argue that it might have had a TINY bit to do with the fact that the fence and the empty plinth stood there for eighty years and then people started to make romantic paintings of the event.

There's an argument that people will OF COURSE remember their history and bad monuments should be pulled down. But the statue to King George isn't interesting because it was pulled down. It's fascinating because it was erected in the first place. It was put up in 1770, and the fence was put up in 1773 when the city passed a law prohibiting defacing the thing. Three years, and they were already pissed off about George? Well. Not exactly. They were pissed off when they put UP the statue in the first place. It was NEVER a beloved tribute to George.

There was a man called William Pitt, a big wig in English government and military. There's a lot to say about him, but I'll skip ahead to the point where he resigned from the British government in the 1760s because they basically wouldn't listen to him. Even though he left, and promised the King he wouldn't outright oppose the government (a worry because he was super popular with not quite the right party as far as the crown was concerned), it didn't mean he kept his mouth shut. He opposed anything that looked like absolute monarchy, and he considered the taxation of the colonies exactly that. Here we come 'round to the bit of the story Americans recognise. He vocally opposed the Stamp Act and is sometimes considered instrumental in its repeal.

What more do you need to do to get the roaring support of dudes in the colonies in 1766? They LOVED him. He also stood for freedom of the press, against wrongful imprisonment and believed in the importance of a *Constitutional* monarchy. He was already a super popular dude, but all this set the colonies on fire for him. Charleston was like, "Dude, we need a statue to this dude. Marble. Roman. Badass." It was the first statue erected to a person in the US. It's still in Charleston somewhere, their judicial building, I think. Virginia was like, "Wait a second, we're putting up statues now?" and asked for King George and a newly deceased governor. The King George statue never made it through negotiations, but the governor's statue is in the basement of the library at William and Mary College. (A full sized reproduction stands in its original location on the campus.) And New York commissioned two statues. They thought it would be weird to just order William Pitt when they didn't even have a statue to the king, so asked for King George, too. Unlike with Pitt's marble, this was gold-gilded lead. I don't have the knowledge to speculate whether this was going the cheap route or not, because while I know the Charleston statue cost one thousand pounds, I can't find figures for the others beyond, "at great cost." I sort of feel like they went, "Eh, it's gold, it's huge, he's on a horse, he can't complain TOO much he's not solid marble, and if we don't publish what it cost, no one has any proof."

We know where George ended up. Well. Sort of. They melted him down for bullets but, like Christian relics, bits of him keep turning up. They know how many bullets were made out of him (48-thousand or so; the exact number is known, but I'm not going to look it up right now), but that accounts for only about two thousand pounds of him. This means that half of him is unaccounted for. The head was stolen back by the British and it was sent to England and has since disappeared. Other bits are in museums or private collections. George Washington allegedly refused to condone the actions of the military in pulling it down, wishing that the job had been left to more appropriate authorities.

William Pitt was erected at the intersection of Wall and William Streets (not named for him, named for Willem Beekman for whom Beekman street is also named- he was a Dutch governor of the city). Today, Donald has a building there if you'd like to visit and flip it off. When the British occupied the city, they beheaded Pitt and knocked some other bits off, but today what's left of him he stands in... either the New York Historical Society Museum or the Museum of the City of New York. I can't remember which. Poor Pitt is largely forgotten in the US, even though the city of Pittsburgh literally bears his name. It was named twenty years before the statues went up, so he was well thought of. He wasn't wholly a good guy, but he said the right things to the Colonists when it mattered. Who do we remember? The dude we pulled down, not the dude we let the enemy deface.

So, there you have the history of New York City's first two statues dedicated to public figures. One is still on display as a reminder of the British occupation of the city and the other one no longer exists because it was pulled down. Except.

In 2016, a Brooklyn sculptor re-imagined King George. Nobody's entirely sure exactly what the statue looked like, because nobody bothered to draw him. Consensus can't really be drawn from his remaining bits, but they know, like the statues of Pitt, he was in Roman garb, additionally, he was on a horse, and made of gilded lead. There's speculation he was based on a Roman statue for Marcus Aurelius. Neo Classicism was kind of a big deal. But somebody thought, "You know, we're forgetting our Revolutionary war history, we're not painting it as rough and tumble patriots vs. a freaking Empire, how do we drive that home?" And somebody was like, "Re-create the statue of King George." So they did. It stands today in a re-creation of Bowling Green in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where they invite you to think about why it was torn down and how you might feel about it as a Colonist living in New York. Apparently, it helps to see the thing that isn't there anymore to better understand.