By Shanna Fuld
Where “Triumph of Civic Virtue,” a statue created by Frederick MacMonnies once stood, to the left of Queens Borough Hall, there is now just an empty platform in a locked fence, but this is soon to change. The new design to be added to the pedestal will celebrate women of Queens, according to the city Department of Design and Construction.
A spokesman for Borough President Melinda Katz said the “DDC is currently reviewing the bids submitted pursuant to a competitive bid process.”
The project is expected to begin in the late fall and finish by the fall of 2016.
The statue that used to stand at the spot is a sculpture showing a muscular man holding a sword over his shoulder, hovering over two women depicted as sirens. The man represents civic virtue while the two women represent vice and corruption. Originally crafted and set down in City Hall Park in 1922, the statue has been relocated more than once.
Twenty years later, then Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia sent the statue to Queens because he had been sick of looking at the statue’s back side.
“Civic Virtue” continued to bother onlookers and was regarded as sexist in more recent times. For this reasons, it was moved in 2012 from Queens to Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn after the statue underwent a restoration process – with the blessings of former Borough President Helen Marshall.
As far as the platform at Queens boulevard goes, the spokesman for Katz said:
“The site will soon host a visible, meaningful tribute to the women of Queens and become a public space utilized and enjoyed by all.”
