The Mythic Tubman in Public Space
A monument does not simply occupy its location passively. The three monuments under consideration in this digital essay were created with different motivations and have varied relationships to the public spaces they occupy. From a city riverfront park to a triangular urban space across from a police station to a revitalized community park, these monuments are situated in public spaces in order to amplify their messages and to communicate with local citizens and visitors alike. Monument are not just singular objects but rather are actively in dialogue with their spaces.
Reclaiming Public Space as Heritage
Mario Chiodo’s Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom resides within the boundaries of the Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, a major reclamation project for the City of Wilmington. In 1995, local officials, business leaders, and residents in Wilmington began efforts to revitalize its riverfront with heritage tourism in mind. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, the Christina River and the Wilmington waterfront were the center of vital local industries including leather tanneries and ship building. In addition, the Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington Railroad had two round houses located along the river. “Gradually, and with cooperation of many groups and individuals, the banks of the Christina River transformed from an abandoned and neglected industrial brownfield to a popular destination for dining, shopping, entertainment, business, recreation, and residential living.”[1]
In 1998-99, the Riverfront Development Corporation of Delaware completed the Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, which is “adjacent to the Market Street Bridge where slaves were transported to freedom. . . . the park was designed in the amphitheater style to complement the architecture of the [nearby] train station district in the early 1900s by the renowned Philadelphia architect Frank Furness.”[2] The city proudly recognized Wilmington as a major station on the Underground Railroad through the creation of the park and the commissioning of an artist to create a monument to Harriet Tubman and Thomas Garrett.
The statue also plays a part in the city’s understanding of its place within the broader history of slavery and the Underground Railroad in Delaware. The Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park is an important stop on the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway in Delaware, and an essential part of Delaware’s heritage tourism. The state has marked and interpreted a range of sites and locations in both rural and urban areas. The National Trust for Historic Preservation offers a definition of heritage tourism from the perspective of the visitor/tourist as “traveling to experience the places, artifacts, and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present. It includes visitation to cultural, historic, and natural resources.”[3]
Heritage tourism also should be understood as a “cultural and social process,” according to Laurajane Smith, “which engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage the present.” Hyung yu Park expands this definition to argue that heritage tourism is institutionally complex and intricate: “Heritage tourism is predominantly concerned with exploring both material (tangible) and immaterial (intangible) remnants of the past. Importantly, heritage is not a fixed or static outcome of the past, particularly when it is presented and represented in the context of tourism. Heritage is constantly reconstructed and reinterpreted in an attempt to meet the specific demands of tourists and reflect the socio-cultural changes of the contemporary world.” Speaking directly to slavery, memory, and heritage, Ana Lucia Arajuo elaborates on the above in relation to a heritage site about slavery: “a place that, according to hegemonic discourses, is officially recognized locally and internationally as having had a significant role during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.”[4]
In 2009, the Underground Railroad Coalition of Delaware and the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom (National Park Service) officially nominated the Harriet Tubman Byway, which was then designated a historical route in 2010. The byway stretches 95 miles in length from the Maryland border at Sandtown to the Delaware/Pennsylvania border with important historic sites associated with the Underground Railroad. Chiodo’s Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom is now considered one of the visual anchors along this historic heritage corridor.
The Politics of Public Space
No monument goes unnoticed. Monuments in public spaces always generate responses, sometimes negative, sometimes outright controversy over site location and artistic vision. Before the dedication of Swing Low, a resident posted a question on “Uptown Flavor,” a Wordpress site dedicated to “Your Harlem Lifestyle.” The question asked: “Does anyone have an explanation as to why the statue of Harriet Tubman located at the Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza is facing toward the South and not the North?”[5]
What ensued were responses filled with confusion and disappointment at the orientation of the monument. The New York Times also reported on the community’s distress of the south-facing statue: “Jacob Morris, director of the non-profit Harlem Historical Society, said neighbors were so upset about the south-facing statue that there is a petition with 1,000 signatures calling for the city to reverse her field of vision. ‘We are serious,’ he said. ‘We hate what they did. It is just an outrage.’”[6]
In a 2014 interview with Percent for Art, Alison Saar responded to the criticism with the following: “She’s [Tubman is] best known for her sojourns north, but what is most impressive to me are her trips south, where she risked her own freedom.” Saar continued: “As impressive as her courage and commitment was, what is amazing to me is her compassion. Harriet Tubman is calling on all of us to look at the compassion within each of us.”[7]
The artist further explained the orientation of her statue: “I intentionally had her facing south. I really wanted to use her story as a call to others to reach out and participate in a similar way in terms of being compassionate and doing volunteer work. The community largely saw it as the figure not facing the direction of The Underground Railroad, which was north-bound. But for Harriet Tubman it was a two-way street; going back and forth, and that’s how I wanted to remember her. People kept demanding that she be turned around. What was nice about all of that was that it really opened up a dialogue with the surrounding community.”[8]
The comments reveal the way in which individuals and communities understand historical persons in specific ways. In this case, the desire to see Tubman steaming northward in the landscape of Harlem was of utmost importance for some residents. They knew their version of the story of Tubman, and wanted the statue to be reoriented. Saar’s explanations just were not sufficient for them, particularly her articulation that the statue should provoke compassion and volunteerism. The re-engineering of the plaza with the subway running beneath it and the narrowness of the plaza had much to do with Saar’s and the landscape architect’s design. Yet, no one seemed to discuss with the public the limitations of the site, leaving the community angry and confused.
Navigate the Google 360 view with the white arrows on the map.
Contested Public Space
Swing Low also reveals something else in its geographical location. First, the statue resides in the same space as the NYPD 28th Precinct, a non-descript monolithic concrete building that dominates the neighborhood with its presence. To have Harriet Tubman face the 28th Precinct day-in and day-out would have been a visual challenge to the NYPD. At the time that the city installed the monument, the NYPD was under intense scrutiny for engaging in practices of targeting African Americans and Latinos through its stop-and-frisk policy (2003-2013). The severity of the building, the NYPD’s actions, and the rising crime statistics in Central Harlem mean that the monument exists within the scope and pressure of 24-hour police presence.[9] It seems likely that Alison Saar and city planners chose deliberately to omit a pistol or rifle from Tubman’s side because of the location of the memorial across from the police department and the long and difficult history of policing and violence in the once predominantly black neighborhood.
Second, since the mid-1980s and with acceleration in the 2000s, Harlem has undergone a radical transformation through gentrification that has displaced black residents. The neighborhood itself has become a contested space. In 2010, the New York Times reported on the radical shifting demographics: “In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population . . . By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, central Harlem’s population has grown more than in any other decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population . . . is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.”[10]
Directly across from Swing Low, is 2280 FDB, with condo units selling for over $1 million, effectively pricing out long-time black residents as access to affordable housing diminishes in Central Harlem. The irony of Saar’s sculpture is that it was installed in Harlem because it was a historic African American neighborhood. Yet, the neighborhood has completely changed. This raises interesting questions about the “work” and “after life” of the statue. Does the statue still function as an icon of resistance with the rapid gentrification and transformation of Harlem?
Revitalizing Public Space
In the 1850s, the South End of Boston was originally conceived as a neighborhood of townhouses for wealthy merchants laid out on a park model of residential squares. Instead, the wealthy flocked to the upscale Back Bay neighborhood and the South End became a working-class immigrant and African American neighborhood. Starting in the 1960s the South End began to witness gradual gentrification. Eventually rising rents and increasing property taxes changed the demographics of the South End. Today, it is predominantly an affluent upper-middle-class neighborhood.[11]
From 1993-2000, the City of Boston invested $3.2 million to improve open spaces in the South End. During this period, the city allotted monies for Harriet Tubman Square to receive a “ground level facelift,” and the Browne Fund, the Henderson Foundation, and the New England Arts Foundation provided grants for a statue memorializing Harriet Tubman, Step on Board. Through this open space plan, the city set out to reclaim and reinvent “passive scenic spaces” into vital community gathering places.[12] Harriet Tubman Square and Step on Board were part of this larger revitalization effort.
Cunningham’s multi figure statue stands at the entrance to the triangular park; Emancipation, a statue of two semi-nude figures by Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), resides at its center. Originally, Fuller created her plaster in 1913 for the National Emancipation Exposition, which was held in New York City at the Twelfth Regiment Armory at Sixty-second Street near Broadway. Fuller made a monument described as “Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children, who, beneath the gnarled fingers of Fate, step forth into the world, unafraid.” The exposition was the largest single celebration of the emancipation in the North and Fuller’s sculpture took center stage at the fair.[13]
In 1998 the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston who co-owned Emancipation suggested the work be cast in bronze and installed with Step on Board. The funders agreed: Emancipation was repaired, cast, and permanently situated in Harriet Tubman Square. Together Emancipation and Step on Board represent the “South End Emancipation Memorial.”[14] The contrast between the two statues is marked. Fuller’s Emancipation is steeped in nineteenth-century modes of representation including the semi-nude bodies of the man and woman who are assisted to freedom by an allegorical representation; Cunningham's Step on Board focuses on a fully in control, proud Harriet Tubman, a self-proclaimed emancipator.
At the dedication of the revitalized park on June 20, 1999, Cunningham remarked on the significant meaning of the South End Emancipation Memorial for her and for those who commissioned the work: “two African American female artists have done these two sculptures. It is important that African Americans are put in positions to make our own statements about our emancipation, our heroes, and our heroines.”[15]
References
[1]Request for Qualifications (RFQ)/Request for Proposal (RFP), Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, Wilmington, Delaware, May 19, 2011, page 2.
[2] Ibid.
[3]Jamesha Gibson, “Preservation Glossary: Today’s Word, Heritage Tourism,” June 17, 2015, National Trust for Historic Preservation, https://savingplaces.org/stories/preservation-glossary-todays-word-heritage-tourism#.XQvShnt7m9s. See also Preservation Leadership Forum, “A Decade of Heritage Tourism,” December 9, 2015, National Trust for Historic Preservation, https://forum.savingplaces.org/viewdocument/a-decade-of-heritage-tourism.
[4]Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 2; Hyung yu Park, Heritage Tourism (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 1; and Ana Lucia Araujo, Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 8.
[5]“Harriet Tubman Memorial,” Uptown Flavor, Wordpress blog, October 29, 2007, accessed April 5, 2018, https://uptownflavor.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/harriet-tubman-memorial-question/.
[6]Timothy Williams, “Why Is Harriet Tubman Facing South?” New York Times, November 13, 2008, accessed April 5, 2018, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/why-is-harriet-tubman-facing-south/.
[7]“Percent for Art Interview/Alison Saar,” New York City Percent for Art, February 20, 2014, accessed April 5, 2018, http://percentforartnyc.tumblr.com/post/77305087355/percent-for-art-interview-alison-saar.
[8]Ibid.
[9]In 2016, documentary photographer Harriet Dedman created a series of images, entitled “In the Shadows of the Precinct” to underscore the uneasy transformation of Harlem. Dedman writes: “My series of photographs starts to draw on concepts of police surveillance, documenting a community constantly living in the shadow of a growing police presence.” See “In the Shadows of the Precinct,” Text and Photos by Harriet Dedman, Magnum Foundation, January 21, 2016, accessed April 4, 2018, https://www.magnumfoundation.org/magnumfoundation/in-the-shadows-of-the-precinct-text-and-photos-by.
[10]Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority, Harlem is in Transition,” New York Times, January 5, 2010, accessed April 5, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html.
[11]“Community Open Space and Recreation Mission: The Neighborhoods,” Open Space and Recreation Plan, 2002-2006, Boston Parks and Recreation Department, pages 217-219, https://www.cityofboston.gov/Parks/openspace/2002_2006.asp
[12] Ibid., 220.
[13]“The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: The Sixth Annual Conference,” The Crisis 8, no. 2 (June 1914): 82; and Renée Ater, Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 73-100.
[14]“Commemorative Program for the Unveiling of Emancipation by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Step On Board by Fern Cunningham,” June 29, 1999, Harriet Tubman Square, Boston, Massachusetts. See also Joe Yonan, “Tubman Leads the Way Again: Sculpture to be First of Woman on City Land,” Boston Globe, April 24, 1997, and Cindy Rodriquez, “A Long-Overdue Tribute: Harriet Tubman Statue will be First of a Black Woman on City Property,” Boston Globe, March 20, 1999.
[15]Gloria Negri, “Her Message Cast In Bronze: In This Sculptor's Work, the Main Theme is Emancipation,” Boston Globe, July 4, 1999.