By Stan Solomon
Small wonder that some out-of-town visitors appear dazed and confused, for our city can sometimes (okay, most times) be a confusing place. Take the tourist-schlock-shop chain “Phantom of Broadway” (please!). Four of its six outlets are not on Broadway but on Fifth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and even a crosstown street…West 57th.
But actually on Broadway, and here on the Upper West Side (just below W. 72nd), is the seemingly misplaced “Little Italy Pizza”…quite a ways uptown from that legendary neighborhood whose name it “borrows.” And don’t bother searching for merchant “67 Wine” anywhere along W.67th Street…you’ll find it a block north, on W. 68th at Columbus Avenue. Finally, were you to walk another 25 blocks north, you would find Columbus Park Shoe Service. Yes, it is on Columbus; but nowhere near the actual Columbus Park, which, as we learn below, is in lower Manhattan.
Although there was no New York City for him to “discover,” the explorer remains popular in this town. We’re all familiar with his “Circle” – either the busy subway stop, the busier traffic circle above, or even the upscale “Shops at Columbus Circle” in the jaw-dropping Time Warner Center. But how many of us know from “Columbus Village?”
Very few, because it doesn’t exist…it was the original name for what is now Columbus Square – the three-year-old multi-tower residential/commercial complex (left) bounded by W. 97th and W. 100th streets between Amsterdam and (naturally) Columbus Avenues. The intent was “to evoke Columbus Circle (but) with a contrasting name,” one of the principals behind the project told The New York Times in June, 2009, adding, “we changed the name to Columbus Square to be in relief of Columbus Circle.”
That developer would not have been too ‘relieved’ had he been told that there already was a “Columbus Square” in our city. Look for it as your cab or limo inches its way towards La Guardia from the RFK-Triboro Bridge. It’s that little open patch on the right, just past the elevated Astoria Boulevard station of the N and Q trains. Of course, in this city “Squares” are usually triangles (cf. our Dante and Verdi “Squares”). Even the City of New York Parks & Recreation website acknowledges this quirk; its listing for Columbus Square begins “This triangle….”.
So it is a “triangular square,” and it dates back to mid-20th Century ethnic pride, with the local Italian-American community commissioning a bronze statue of Columbus steering his ship. But in 1890 it was less ethnic pride and more the hope to make-a-buck that gave the Upper West Side an entire avenue named for Columbus. According to Sanna Feirstein’s Naming New York, a group of landowners pushed to rename Ninth Avenue just “to confer a bit of old-world cachet to their real estate investments in an area that had yet to catch on.” Or, as the website NYCtourist.com puts it, “the place was still on the outskirts of town.”
The twin needs to play dress-up and honor ethnicity also helped rename lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Bend Park, itself built to replace the fetid tenements of the infamous Five Points neighborhood, as Columbus Park, the result of a 1911 Board of Aldermen vote. Ironically, it was also the work of politicians that helped give the Upper West Side its Columbus Circle.
In a very rare instance of Congressional foresight, that august body in 1890 proclaimed that the nation should honor the upcoming 400th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 arrival on our shores. This would lead to the famed 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition, a.k.a. Chicago World’s Fair, when that city won over its competitors: St. Louis, The District of Columbia, and…New York City.
‘Hey, what are we, chopped Capicola?’ was what New York’s miffed Italian-American community probably thought, and eventually it would be announced that an imposing and tall statue honoring the explorer would rise near the southwest corner of Central Park. Christopher would be carved of marble and his 70-foot-high pedestal of granite. Down its flank would appear bronze-relief versions of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria…the ships about which you learned back in elementary school, when you, too, probably recited: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Although the statue was hoisted into place in 1894, there was no actual Circle until 1905, when the city built it based upon the theories of William P. Eno, called “The Father of Traffic Safety” for his proposing not just traffic circles but also stop signs and one-way streets…even though he himself never learned to drive. For some 49 years Columbus Circle just sat there, collecting around its circumference a rag-tag collection of residential and commercial buildings.
Until 1954, when the legendary Robert Moses had the entire western half of Columbus Circle declared a slum, used Title-I slum clearance funds to bulldoze the area, and created the New York Coliseum, which opened in 1956. A 1956 three-cent commemorative postage stamp depicts that oft-reviled building, with Chris Columbus stoically ignoring it as he stands atop his pedestal. Eight years later he would have another new neighbor, when 2 Columbus Circle (a.k.a.: “The Huntington Hartford Museum,” “the Gallery of Modern Art,” and, sometimes, “The Lollipop Building” for its distinctive street-level façade) appeared on the south side of Columbus Circle. In 2000 Coliseum-haters rejoiced, for the object of their vitriol was demolished. On its site would rise today’s Time Warner Center, which opened in 2003. Two years later Columbus Circle got its award-winning (American Society of Landscape Artists, 2006) makeover, complete with the fountains, benches, and plantings that most of us barely acknowledge but which do wow the tourists…and comfort the occasional homeless person.
And so, 118 years after he was first installed, Christopher Columbus stands atop his 70-foot-high perch, still watching over his much-altered Circle, which, according to Wikipedia, is the official point from which all distances to/from New York City are measured. And, since Columbus Circle is often called the Gateway to the Upper West Side, that fact should make us all feel terrific…for it can be interpreted to mean that Columbus Circle…and, by extension, the Upper West Side…truly is the center of New York City.
Top and bottom photos by Gwen Solomon, Columbus Square photo by rbs10025, and photo of Columbus statue by Stan Solomon.
For more columns by Stan Solomon, click here.
I love the new Columbus circle; I dont barely acknowledge it. it’s the best place to eat prepared food take out from whole foods on a nice day!