The Central Park Obelisk and Cultural Consecration denied Fiona Rose-Greenland University of Chicago
[email protected] Version 2015.09.29 Abstract Why does retrospective consecration fail to materialize in cultural products that share characteristics of successfully consecrated, comparable cultural products? This paper focuses on the case of the Egyptian obelisk in New York's Central Park. The obelisk arrived in New York from Alexandria in 1880, with great fanfare. For a brief period the obelisk was the talk of the town: a tourist curiosity and star of advertising campaigns for consumer goods. After riding the wave of fame, the monument's prominence faded. Today the obelisk is not on the list of New York’s top cultural attractions, and no longer features in media campaigns or political rallies. To study this case, I draw on archival data from the late 19th century, charting the obelisk's transfer of ownership and planned move, through to its New York début and subsequent decline. The obelisk met key criteria associated with successful cases of retrospective consecration. What weakened the obelisk's career were lack of consecrating institutions and inherently unstable material conditions. These mechanisms are symbiotically related: because no institution took responsibility for conserving and protecting the obelisk, its granite facing rapidly deteriorated and frustrated attempts to attract potential consecrating institutions. The chapter makes a twofold contribution to the literature on retrospective consecration. First, by discussing a failed case it highlights the linked efficacy of consecration formation mechanisms. Second, in focusing on an ancient monument it demonstrates the role played by materials and the specific measures of consecration that obtain in the broader sphere of ancient monuments. Keywords Materiality, spectacle, entropy, Central Park obelisk, heritage consecration
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INTRODUCTION When does retrospective consecration fail? The literature on cultural consecration has developed around positive cases. Through studies of baseball hall of famers and best-ever album and film rankings, among others, we have a clear understanding of the factors that contribute to this outcome. Popular recognition, professional recognition, critical acclaim, and legitimating institutions build on each other and, ideally, culminate in the “magic” of retrospective consecration (Allen & Lincoln 2004; Bourdieu 1984; Schmutz 2005). It is not imperative that each of these criteria be met. Critics and institutional actors can override public disinterest to consecrate a film languishing in obscurity, for example, while a prestigious professional recognition such as the Oscar Award might jumpstart the process of consecration by drawing favorable attention to a film, person, or production element. An important aspect of cultural consecration, however, remains neglected: Why does retrospective consecration fail to materialize in cultural products that feature the key characteristics of successfully consecrated, comparable cultural products? To sketch an approach to this problem, I offer a case study of the obelisk of Thutmose III in New York’s Central Park. The obelisk, widely (and misleadingly) called Cleopatra’s Needle, was for a brief period the most famous object in the city, celebrated as an icon of engineering genius and historical achievement (D’Alton 1993). The obelisk was moved to New York with great fanfare, electrifying the public as newspapers charted the exciting and dangerous voyage of the obelisk and its US Navy custodians from Egypt to Lower Manhattan (Dibner 1950). All of that is an interesting story in itself, but what I want to focus on here is the question of why the obelisk failed to be consecrated culturally. In 1885, four years after the obelisk’s setting up, a major conservation effort inadvertently stripped off significant portions of the hieroglyphs. In 1893 a
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geologist at Columbia College mounted a campaign to save the obelisk from the city’s ravages. He blamed the weather but also New Yorkers, who evidently no longer cared for or saw any value in it because their insatiable appetite for new spectacles obscured the “significant idea” of the obelisk (Julien 1893: 69). A succession of petitions to the Parks Commission and the Metropolitan Museum failed to elicit much-needed funding for sustained conservation work. One hundred and thirty years after the obelisk’s dedication in Central Park, Egypt’s Director-General of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, warned Mayor Bloomberg that the patience of Egypt’s cultural officials had worn thin. Without immediate and substantive action to restore the obelisk to its full material and symbolic dignity, Hawass would formally seek the physical return of the obelisk.1 The city of New York, he alleged, had failed in its obligation to care properly for the monument. How did it come to pass that the Central Park obelisk, once the most sought-after tourist site in America’s most populous city, sank to such lows? On the surface, the obelisk seemed to satisfy important criteria associated with successful cases of retrospective consecration: it was wildly popular, attracted positive interest from scholars, and became connected with powerful institutions. Perhaps most significantly for any candidate for retrospective consecration, the obelisk possessed significant temporal durability. As the case analysis will demonstrate, however, public and institutional interest was too fleeting to concretize into sustained legitimacy. Furthermore, the obelisk’s inherently unstable material conditions detracted from its physical attractiveness and thereby weakened its symbolic resonance. One mark of successfully consecrated ancient monuments is good patina, or the cultivated polish of the antique. The manner of the obelisk’s ageing was ruinous. It produced poor patina. It failed to connect with local history and cultural practices. In the terminology of consecration studies, it failed the test of time (Schmutz 2005). 1
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/egypt-or-central-park-where-does-an-ancient-obelisk-belong/
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To be clear, I do not argue that the obelisk has no meaning. There are countless individuals for whom the object is significant for personal reasons, because it triggers memories of grade school field trips and contemplative walks in Central Park, or simply because it is beautiful and mysterious. Those are valid perspectives on the obelisk and they merit recognition. My focus is the specific process of cultural consecration, and to this end I attend to group patterns of reception and narrative. Individuals’ esteem does not necessarily coalesce into consecration. Consecration is the outcome of collective processes. My argument is that the obelisk met necessary conditions for consecration but was nevertheless insufficiently positioned to attain consecration. The paper is organized as follows. In the first section I link the literature on retrospective consecration with the literature on cultural heritage. I argue that heritage, as a space of material production and continual selection, sustains a process of retrospective consecration that differs in important ways from those of film, music, and professional sports. Materiality is a vital aspect of heritage consecration. In the second section I present the case of the Central Park obelisk, tracing its journey from Heliopolis to Alexandria and finally to New York City. The circumstances of its legal transfer from the Khedive to the City of New York as well as its physical transfer through feats of spectacular engineering contributed to the object’s popular legitimacy. There was, nevertheless, serious controversy in the transfer. Political disputes and the inherent vices of Egyptian granite weakened the obelisk’s social position in New York, sealing its fate as a case of failed consecration. The third and final section suggests further refinements for scholarly work on heritage consecration and materiality. Before introducing the relevant lines of scholarly thought, a word is in order concerning my methodology and logic of the case design.
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Methods and case design To understand the case of the Central Park obelisk I offer a comparative-historical analysis informed by period documents, formal analysis of the object, and comparison with two contrasting objects. My central concern is to introduce ancient monuments into the paradigm of retrospective consecration studies. This requires looking for relevant variables, rather than assuming that the usual variables apply and then measuring them. I focus on a single case, looking deeply at the actors and events involved in it. The strategy follows Becker’s “lookingfor-complications” model, in which the unfamiliar elements of a new case improve generalizations by “identifying new things to add to the grid of variable elements that helps us understand any case of that kind” (Becker 2014: 14). The Central Park obelisk offers several elements unfamiliar to the usual case studies for this paradigm, which tend to be drawn from the worlds of sports and entertainment. Building out the main case is one step in the study design. To draw out unfamiliar elements from that case demands a second step: comparison. Since comparison takes different forms within cultural sociology (to say nothing of the discipline as a whole), it is important to explain the comparative strategy chosen here. I adopt Smelser’s definition of comparison as producing “the description and explanation of similarities and differences of conditions or outcomes” among cases (Smelser 2003: 645). Smelser attached that definition to the study of large-scale social units such as nations and cultures. My empirical focus is more modest: specific cultural objects. To adjust to the empirics of the present inquiry I combine the tools of sociological cross-case analysis and art historical comparison. I contrast the obelisk with the materials and symbolic affordances of the Statue of Liberty and the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum because they overlap in key areas of art historical study including genre, style,
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intentionality, and periodicity (e.g., ancient vs. modern) (on formal comparison in cultural sociology: Zubrzycki 2011). Random sampling of contrasting cases could produce an alternative explanation. This possibility is beyond the scope of the current discussion, the goal of which is to sketch an approach to a new case of retrospective consecration analysis; but it should be borne in mind as a potentially fruitful line of future investigation. The historical data consist of period texts drawn from newspapers, books, and guidebooks to New York city. Newspapers were the primary medium for communicating with the New York public in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1896, for example, the New York World had a circulation of 600,00 in its morning and evening editions, and the New York Journal’s circulation stood at 430,000 (Schudson 1981: 111). This was at a time when the population of New York City was 1.5 million, and the literacy rate among all Americans fourteen years of age and older was about 87%.2 Because of intense competition among New York newspapers for readers and advertisers, the papers tried to differentiate by promising unique revelations. When the obelisk arrived in the city, the major papers played up “obelisk fever” to the hilt, offering such features as an illustrated guide to the hieroglyphs and detailed lists of the A-list guests at the dedication ceremony. Newspapers, in short, were the means of public communication about the obelisk, and they offer crucial clues about the narratives that were attached to it. Rounding out the historical data are period non-fiction books about the obelisk’s arrival into and reception in New York, and advertisements that featured the obelisk to flog consumer goods. I located these items through the archives record locator of the New York Public Library’s Brooke Astor Reading Room, prioritizing items produced between 1880 and 1920 so as to increase the chances of reading texts by eyewitnesses and direct participants. 2
Figure based on “120 Years of Literacy” report from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), accessed 9/28/2015: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#educational
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Why does the Central Park obelisk make sense for an inquiry into failed consecration? The obelisk belongs to two general categories that are populated by many consecrated cases. Those categories are Egyptian antiquities and public monuments. Egyptian antiquities are the rock stars of the artifact record. They are widely coveted as collectors’ items. On the macro scale, the pyramids at Giza remain one of the most iconic sites in the world. By definition, a “public monument” should be consecrational. It is set up to honor an individual, group, or event, and signifies something superlative about the honoree(s). Furthermore, ancient Egyptian obelisks in other parts of the world have attained retrospective consecration. The Luxor obelisk in Paris’s Place de la Concorde is a historical icon, having been the center of political protests and celebrations at various points in the 19th century and, more recently, sheathed by a condom as an AIDS awareness tactic. Finally, the Central Park obelisk is located in the city of “greats.” It has the institutional and financial capacity to consecrate cultural standouts. Given this promising context, the obelisk’s lack of consecration merits study. MODERN CONSECRATION OF ANCIENT MATERIALITY What does it mean for an ancient object to be consecrated in modern terms? Consecration works a bit differently in the world of antiquities than it does in the world of film, music, books, and baseball. For a start, ancient monuments are not a mass consumer good. Because ancient objects constitute a finite resource they are more likely to be judged as unique, precluding the like-forlike comparisons that happen with rock albums and novels. Second, unlike professional athletes antiquities’ qualities cannot be assessed by performance statistics (Allen & Parsons 2006). While measures of performance are applied to antiquities’ touristic interest – for example, the number of visitors’ tickets sold or the money flows into local hospitality industry – the cultural object itself is deliberately protected from overt quantification (Rizzo & Towse 2002). Third, whereas
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literature, music, and movies are tightly linked with a correlative space of industry gatekeeping, antiquities enjoy a fictive uncoupling from production and industry concerns (Razlogov 1998). I say “fictive uncoupling” because although ancient monuments like the obelisk are presented as symbolically and historically significant sui generis, significance has to be produced using commercial, political, and academic mechanisms (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983; KirshenblattGimblett 2004). Heritage is one possible evaluative designation for ancient objects (Byrne 2014; Peleggi 2002). In its broadest sense, “heritage” refers to the set of rituals, material traditions, objects, and everyday cultural practices that anchor a person or group in a temporally mediated identity (Cameron & Rössler 2012). As a consecrating process, heritage is manifest in three main institutional mechanisms: enlistment, inscription, and ranking. Enlistment is the act of identifying sites and structures that have cultural and historical importance for a population. It is exhaustive rather than competitive, and typically limited to a single country (with smaller designation bodies operating at the state and municipal levels). Enlistment does not imply a ranking of significance, and additional designees do not dilute the magic of pre-existing ones. Actors involved in enlistment include appointed and elected members of Historic Preservation Boards, volunteers for civic societies, and employees of government-sponsored bodies. Inscription is best known through the UNESCO World Heritage List, which was created through the 1975 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. In the early years, the List’s leadership committee concentrated on listing “the best of the best,” or iconic sites. Iconic sites are buildings and spaces “that transcend cultural affiliation, sites that are unique and widely known” (Cameron 2005: 2). While the List now emphasizes sites that are “representative of the best” – indexical rather than iconic – the idea of iconicity still dominates public discourse about ancient sites and
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monuments and their modern valuation. Unlike enlistment, inscription is not exhaustive. Satisfying a checklist of criteria does not guarantee inscription (Meskell 2013). Instead, inscription is a competitive process involving member states’ self-promotion and alliances. Once a site is inscribed it is there indefinitely. Inscription in the World Heritage List is an act of consecration, bearing the “magic list of global status” (Askew 2010). Ranking assigns comparative value to things, whether universities, restaurants, or cars. In the realm of ancient monuments, “best-ever” lists can be traced at least as far back as the 5th century BCE, with the Greek historian Herodotus enumerating the greatest achievements of architecture and human-engineered beauty. The consecration list most familiar to us from antiquity, the “wonders list”, was a later development, with authorial credit for the canonical Seven Wonders currently given to the 4th/5th century CE writer Philo of Byzantium (Dalley 2013). Philo’s Seven Wonders skew towards grand and technically sophisticated structures. He justified his picks with reference to earlier historians and eyewitness testimony to the resources involved in their construction and the spellbinding effect they had on beholders. Ranking was a discursive space for comparing not just objects themselves but the civilizations that produced them and, implicitly, the cultures that did not appear on the lists. Each of these organizing mechanisms – enlistment, inscription, and ranking – involve similar processes at work on books, films, and albums. Scholarly recognition articulates the object’s significance along lines of history, aesthetics, and culture. Institutional sponsorship from organizations such as UNESCO and the National Heritage Trust embeds the objects in a network of patronage and gatekeeping authority (Rico 2008; Schmitt 2009; Scholze 2008). Popular legitimacy, while not always statistically measurable in the sense of box office sales, is manifest in such activities as community petitioning to inscribe or enlist a historic building or site. These
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processes do not necessarily link up like cars in a train, moving in linear fashion towards the same destination. Rather, one may serve as the engine that drives the others, or they may gather steam on separate lines and eventually converge. The sculpted marble figures from the Parthenon in Athens, now in the British Museum, offer one example of how these processes can function in the modern consecration of ancient monuments. When the sculptures arrived in London in 1804 two auction specialists inspected them on behalf of the government. The question put to them was whether the marbles were of sufficient quality to warrant government purchase. Their answer: no. The marbles were deemed worthless due to their poor condition (Smith 1916). The marbles’ new owner, Lord Elgin, subsequently rented a warehouse and for the next few years built a network of admirers who enjoyed intimate encounters with the sculptures in private gatherings (Rose-Greenland 2013). The marbles became an underground sensation. Connoisseurs praised their form and style, and it became a mark of distinction to be able to articulate the marbles’ aesthetic and historic value. By 1816 a Parliamentary Select Committee recommended purchasing the entire set of sculptures for the sum of 35,000 pounds. The sculptures became part of the British Museum collection and now constitute its most famous (if controversial) exhibit. Elgin turned the marbles from trash into treasure first by cultivating scholarly acclaim via connoisseurs. Their appreciation for the sculptures’ material qualities generated popular acclaim, which was augmented by intensified competition from the French for appropriating monumental antiquities. Institutional sponsorship followed, carried on the wave of scholarly and popular interest. The Parthenon marbles and the Central Park obelisk have equally prestigious histories, with lineages tracing back to emperors, pharaohs, and the birthplace of civilizations. What this brief comparison reminds us, however, is that ancient pedigree is a necessary but insufficient
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condition for retrospective consecration. To be a hit in modernity, the ancient monument cannot just be old; rather, it has to be the right kind of old. It needs a winning patina, which means genteel ruins suffused with nostalgia and preferably set in a bucolic landscape set apart from contemporary people and infrastructure (Melzer 2013). As the case discussion will demonstrate, this requires managing the ageing of the object with rhetoric, science, and iconography. ENGINEERING TRIUMPH: OBELISKS ON THE MOVE Obelisks are giant upright stones, shaped with four flat sides and tapered to a point at the top. They were invented in Egypt, where they were used as sacred objects and advertisements of rulers’ achievements and piety (Habachi 1977). Obelisks were not intended to serve a practical function, nor did they convey one specific symbolic message. In their earliest phase obelisks offered a gesture of reverence to the sun god Re (Assmann 2001). In subsequent centuries they commemorated pharaohs’ military achievements, longevity, and anniversaries. If a generic symbolic value can be assigned to them, then, it is power and wealth, the two key prerequisites to creating and erecting an obelisk. To make and move an obelisk for Ramesses IV in the 12th century BCE required 8,362 men, among them 5,000 slaves, 2,000 gendarmes, and hundreds more officers, quarrymen, and stonecutters. Nine hundred workmen died in the process and were not included in the total (Curran, Grafton, Long & Weiss 2009: 30). The work was laborintensive because the obelisk had to be crafted and hauled in one piece. The continuous and unbroken shaft symbolized “eternity and everlastingness,” as revealed in an inscription at the base of an obelisk at Karnak. The monolithic imperative explains why the engineering team for the Central Park obelisk did not cut it into pieces for reassembly. As much for symbolism as engineering bragging rights, the Americans were intent on keeping their obelisk unbroken.
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Foreign appropriation and exportation of obelisks began in the late 1st century BCE, when the Emperor Augustus ordered that four be brought to Rome (Sorek 2010). Over the centuries nearly two-dozen obelisks have made the voyage from Egypt to Europe or the New World. Eighteen of the remaining thirty obelisks are in Italy, two are in France, two are in England, and one is in the United States. Egypt retains seven. Moving an obelisk requires an enormous commitment of resources and skill. They are heavy. The Central Park obelisk weighs 224 tons (a snip in comparison with the Lateran obelisk in Rome, which weighs 510 tons). They are long. The twelve tallest range from 67 to 105 feet tall. The ancient Egyptians had precise methods for producing, hauling, and erecting the massive plinths. On the walls of the 15th century BCE funerary temple to the pharaoh Hatshepsut, for example, carvings depict nine boats linked together to transport an obelisk down the Nile. An obelisk is not a battle-won spoil, snatched by brute force from the vanquished enemy. It is a burdensome trophy whose appropriation requires time, money, and engineering genius. Rising to this challenge, and broadcasting it to audiences at home and abroad, is a core feature of the entire phenomenon of hauling obelisks. When the obelisk in St Peter’s Square was moved to its new location in front of the Vatican in 1586, two masses were performed in front of a huge crowd, linking religious with scientific spectacle. A quarter of a million Parisians witnessed the raising of the Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in 1836. This was “impossible engineering” in action. Where Chandra Mukerji applied that phrase to large-scale hydraulic projects in 17th century France, it is equally apt for the phenomenon of obelisk engineering. Moving and erecting obelisks was “a silent demonstration of disciplinary power over the earth, [pointing] obliquely toward techniques of governance that lay beyond the visible and familiar practices of domination” (Mukerji 2009: 2 for the quotation).
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An obelisk for New York The Central Park obelisk was one of a pair built around 1500 B.C. to honor Pharaoh Thutmose III, the son of Hatshepsut. Its twin obelisk currently stands in London. They were originally set up in the royal city of Heliopolis. The Greek historian Strabo visited Heliopolis in 24 BCE and wrote that the city was by then entirely deserted, still bearing the scars of much-earlier sacks and battles. The obelisks had been “mutilated and burned on every side” (Strabo 17.1.27). The obelisks were moved to Alexandria by Cleopatra to honor her lover, Julius Caesar, and that is where they stayed for nearly 1,900 years. The circumstances of the obelisk’s transfer to New York City are murky. The plan may have originated in the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, when the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, apparently mentioned to a New York newspaper reporter that the United States ought to have an obelisk of its own (Curran et al. 2009: 272). Subsequent versions differed as to whether the Khedive made the offer outright or the editor misunderstood. The American consul in Egypt, Elbert Farman, is circumspect in his own account of the transaction (Farman 1908). Support for the project, according to Farman, was uneven: The German and French archaeologists fought the removal of the obelisk and incited interference by local authorities. They were perfectly content to let the shaft disintegrate but would not lift a finger to help in its removal. (Dibner 1950: 45) Out of a tangle of relations involving British, French, American, and Egyptian officials, and opposition by “unfriendly” European scholars in Alexandria, one obelisk left for London in 1877 and another for New York in 1880, a third having sailed to Paris in 1831-3 (Solé 2004 on the circumstances of the Paris obelisk’s journey). The Khedive offered no money to assist with the move. The obelisk was America’s for the taking, but funds for the expedition would have to be
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provided by the Americans. The Khedive’s interlocutor at the Suez Canal event was William Henry Hurlbert, a talented journalist with an ear for a story. He took up the challenge. Hurlbert struggled early on to find financial backing. The city of New York could not pay for the obelisk’s move, owing to severe budgetary constraints. The United States Congress “promptly vetoed the idea,” according to an early 20th century writer (Crosby 1943: 2). It was a period of American history in which the “grand, pointless gesture” of monument building was unpopular. Americans, the New York Times opined in 1855, commemorated their history with the printed word – those millions of books and newspapers democratically distributed among the citizenry, not through Old World-style monuments put up by kings and despots (Curran et al. 2009: 270). It was not a good political climate for leveraging public funds to transport an obelisk from Alexandria to New York City. Hurlbert and his small team of obelisk supporters sought private funding and in 1879 railroad tycoon William H. Vanderbilt stepped forward to pledge his support. Vanderbilt’s generous gesture was an early turn in the road away from the obelisk’s attaining retrospective consecration. The obelisk was henceforth a private investment, managed by a close group of backers and staged as an elaborate news stunt. The details of the obelisk’s movement from Alexandria to Central Park can be compressed as follows. The stone set sail from Alexandria on June 12, 1880, under supervision of Lieutenant-Commander Henry Gorringe of the United States Navy. The ship arrived in New York on July 20, 1880, and after some negotiating the captain found a suitable dock (Gorringe 1885: 39-40). Cranes unloaded the pedestal stone, which was then slung on chains under a fourwheel carriage drawn by 32 horses. Hydraulic jacks had to push the carriage out of occasional ruts made in the road by the heavy rear wheels. Once unloaded from the ship, the obelisk was moved along a temporary railway built specifically for the event. Newspapers followed in
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breathless detail the slow progress of the obelisk from the docks of Lower Manhattan to Central Park. With line drawings and detailed interviews with architects and engineers, readers could gain intimate familiarity with the scaffolds, pulleys, rigs, joins, crabs, and hoists involved. This was, then, a two-part spectacle: the printed chronicling of the obelisk’s arduous journey, and then eventually the crowded ceremony at the site of the monolith’s new home. The location in Central Park had been selected even before Gorringe set out for Egypt in August of 1879. A three-person committee, including Gorringe and Hurlbert, recommended four midtown sites: the intersection of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the intersection of 59th Street and Eighth Avenue, the southeast entrance to Central Park, or the southwest entrance. All of these were reasonably easy to reach from the dock, offered flat ground, and featured tall buildings such that obelisk viewers could look at the decorations on the shaft from the windows. Vanderbilt rejected them all. He preferred Central Park, in the Graywacke Knoll near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gorringe recounted: In order to avoid needless discussion of the subject, it was decided to maintain the strictest secrecy as to the location determined on. The site that was adopted, the spot on which the obelisk now stands, is perhaps the worst one within the city limits for getting an obelisk to. Vanderbilt did not want the obelisk to be surrounded by tall buildings, towering above it and diminishing its impact. Gorringe conceded the stylistic mismatch: “There can hardly be found a wider separation of architectural design than an ancient Egyptian temple and a modern New York building.” The committee agreed that the Graywacke Knoll would guarantee the obelisk its “sublime isolation”. The Knoll would, they hoped, provide a “natural and imperishable foundation on which the obelisk will stand erect until it is pulled down by man or thrown down by some violent convulsion of nature” (Gorringe 1885: 30-32).
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On January 22, 1881, ten thousand people gathered in Central Park to watch the obelisk’s commemoration. The New York Times reported a crowd so packed that people groaned under the surge. According to Gorringe, thirty thousand people lined the streets to watch the parade that culminated in the obelisk dedication ceremony. The parade included nine thousand Freemasons, who were exhorted to participate by the Grand Master of the Freemasons for the state of New York. It was an honor to take part in the proceedings, according to the Grand Master, in “becoming connected with the noble enterprise of placing this historical monument of Egypt in the metropolitan city” (Gorringe 1885: 34). A stage was purpose built at Graywacke Knoll and the New York Times reported that the honorable guests included the Chief Justice of the New York Court of Common Pleas, the president of Columbia College, Cornelius Vanderbilt and his daughter, Parks Commissioners, several high-ranking clergymen, Hurlbert, Gorringe, and “100 honor boys, selected from the public schools.”3 For a brief period the obelisk was held up as a national achievement. A week after the public dedication ceremony, the United States Senate passed a resolution praising Gorringe for his service. Congress and the President followed suit, recognizing “the sentiment of national pride naturally felt in this successful achievement” (Gorringe 1885: 57). There was one more large-scale event associated with the Central Park obelisk. In February 1881 the Mayor of New York hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Opera House. Opera stars and the orchestra offered a musical tribute to the obelisk’s arrival in the city. City grandees offered another round of speeches. And then, wrote one contemporary chronicler, “oblivion.” To understand what the author meant by this we need to look at the path that it followed and, as comparison, an alternative path that could have led to sustained fame and integral social importance. This is the path traveled by “Liberty Enlightening the World,” better known as the Statue of Liberty. 3
New York Times February 23, 1881, p. 8.
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Public legitimation: contrasting perspectives The Central Park obelisk became a commercial fad after the public resolutions had been passed and the civic grandees had delivered their speeches. Gorringe rode his wave of fame into a profitable business as a consulting engineer. He published a book on the obelisk’s move, and gave a series of public (and evidently well-attended) lectures. Gorringe died in July 1885 at the age of 43 from injuries sustained during a fall from a moving train. The obelisk took a star turn in advertisements for products ranging from Pond’s soap and Vaseline to hotels and spool cotton. Its distinctive profile was etched into a commemorative medal produced by the Freemasons and reproduced on playing cards, postcards, and pens.4 Five years after the ceremony at Graywacke Knoll, New York was given another monument. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Liberty Island in October 1886, a gift from the nation of France to the people of the United States. The statue was from its inception a public project and a joint one. Public fundraising occurred on both sides of the ocean. In France, 250,000 Francs were raised through a lottery and ticket sales for exclusive viewings. In the United States, fundraising efforts included an auction of art and manuscripts and public donation appeals (Khan 2010). The governor of New York vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the completion of the statue’s pedestal, and the following year, 1885, the United States Congress voted down a bill to provide $100,000. In response, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, launched a drive to raise $100,000. He promised to print the name of everyone who contributed at any level. Pulitzer’s drive was enormously successful. Thousands of contributions flooded in, and as work on the pedestal continued there emerged a strong narrative of the statue as a shared creation (Khan 2010: 171-2). On the day of the statue’s dedication it received an 4
Selection of objects included in the “Cleopatra’s Needle” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 3, 2013 – June 8, 2014.
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honor parade, just as the obelisk had. This one drew a crowd that dwarfed that of the obelisk procession; it was estimated to have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Management of the statue was handed over to the Federal Government, and through the years it became a landmark associated with immigration and the hope for a better life in America (Blanchet & Dard 1985). The narrative contrasts between the Central Park obelisk and the Statue of Liberty are striking, as evidenced by period guidebooks. Guidebooks are a useful source of information on how the monuments were presented to a broad audience because they both reflected and shaped popular interests (Mir 2012). The Taintor Brothers’ City of New York: A Complete Guide, published in 1885, presented the obelisk to the city’s visitors as a monument of antiquity with “unintelligible” inscriptions. The guide compressed the story of the obelisk into a single brief paragraph and emphasized the “difficult engineering feat” involved in its transfer to New York (City of New York 1885: 56). The King’s Handbook of New York City, an authoritative guidebook for visitors and locals, emphasized the object’s exotic origins and time travel: The Egyptian Obelisk, in Central Park, is one of the most interesting historical relics in the metropolis. […] It is sixth in size of the famous obelisks of Egypt, and was erected in the Temple of On, 3,500 years ago, by King Thothmes III. […] The obelisk was old in the days of the Roman Empire; antedates the Christian Era by fifteen centuries; looked down upon the land of Egypt before the siege of Troy; and was familiar to the Israelites in bondage. It now stands on a knoll near the Museum of Art, an impressive reminder of a far-away past. (King 1892: 167)
King’s Handbook includes the obelisk in a chapter entitled “Thoroughfares and Adornments.” The obelisk appears near the end of a list of monuments and statues. There is no illustration of the obelisk. There is, on the other hand, a full-page illustration of the Statue of Liberty, which King’s describes as follows: Liberty Enlightening the World is probably the best-known statue in the United States. It stands in New-York Bay, on Bedloe’s Island, formerly the place of
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execution of pirates; and is one of the most conspicuous objects in view, either from the surrounding shores or from the decks of ocean vessels bound through the Narrows. […] The left hand clasps close to the body a tablet bearing the inscription “July 4, 1776.” […] It is admired for its magnificent proportions, and by general consent it is admitted to be one of the world’s greatest colossi and the largest made in modern times. […] (King 1892: 160-161)
The statue, then, was a symbol of American freedom, with widespread public support. It was visible to the eye and intelligible to a wide audience – New Yorkers, native-born Americans, immigrants, the poor, and the rich could all make meaning of the statue. It had a strong connection to local history. The obelisk, after its initial prominence as an engineering triumph, became embedded in a discourse of mystery and cult. The hieroglyphs required special knowledge, which limited the symbolic resonance of the obelisk to specialists. Fame, scholarly interest, and institutional involvement in the obelisk’s dedication did not translate into popular legitimation, critical acclaim, and institutional legitimation – three of the core features of successful cases of cultural consecration. The monolith did not lack for associations. Freemasons, international diplomacy, consumer goods, celebrities, and private investment could all claim a share of the stone. These associations did not connect with each other in any durable or meaningful way, however. They remained fleeting, dissociated messages and were unable to imbue the stone with clear symbolic resonance. A further dimension of the obelisk ontology helps explain this failure: the materials themselves.
Materiality and cultural consecration “It has no beauty and no shapeliness. It is only a broken, decayed and disfigured old block of stone.”5 That was the pronouncement of the New York Sun on the obelisk prior to its arrival in 5
The New York Sun, October 31, 1879.
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Central Park. Public cheering for the obelisk’s dedication muted the naysayers. But the Sun’s misgivings proved prescient. The Aswan granite that had withstood nearly three thousand years of exposure in Egypt was no match for New York City winters, and by 1885 the obelisk was showing signs of severe decay. An attempt to protect the stone with a coating of paraffin did attenuate the harmful process of swelling and shrinking, but the waterproofing company hired to carry out the job inadvertently sloughed off 780 pounds’ worth of material including scales and flakes from the carved surfaces (D’Alton 1993: 66). As a result, the carved surface elements lost their depth and were difficult to discern. If it looked broken and decayed before its dedication on Graywacke Knoll, it looked like a peeled carrot afterwards. Material affordances are positive or negative depending on the location. Aswan granite was an ideal material for creating obelisks in ancient Egypt. It is sufficiently durable to hold together for long-distance transport in a single block, yet sufficiently porous for fine-detailed carving. Aswan granite is not ideal for an open park in New York City. Climatic factors have already been cited. In addition, there are symbolic factors. New York in the late 19th century was a city of iron and steel. When the American Surety Building, then New York’s tallest building, went up in 1894-6 it was on a steel frame. The Brooklyn Bridge, another engineering spectacle of the age, drew its suspension strength from steel ropes. Granite was incorporated as facing and architectonic decoration, yet it could not provide the soaring height of steel – and it was height that mattered as the city grew in population, political influence, and economic power. The obelisk’s material components thus presented considerable challenges for its keepers. And as the granite weakened and the monolith’s appearance deteriorated, claimants thinned out. The obelisk’s unlovable appearance early on – “no beauty and no shapeliness” – marked it as ruined but not a Ruin. Its vulnerability was confirmed by the steady deterioration in those first five
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years in the Park, and the sorry appearance after the paraffin treatment sloughed away any lingering material attractions.
DISCUSSION Today the obelisk belongs to the City of New York and is cared for by the Central Parks Conservancy, with support from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. This arrangement is the outcome of decades of managerial wrangling. The city and its parks department were initially resistant to paying for the obelisk’s upkeep. It was seen as Vanderbilt’s purchase and the Freemasons’ fetish, set up on Graywacke Knoll as a courtesy of the parks commission. The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not step forward to conserve and curate it, as the project’s early backers had hoped. The Met has at several points offered neighborly interest in the form of museum exhibitions and tour materials, but responsibility for the obelisk’s material welfare remains dispersed. Problematic materiality leads to the first conceptual finding of this paper. Age is a necessary but insufficient condition for assuring cultural consecration. The obelisk had ancient lineage in spades, but its granite has aged unfavorably. It had failed to cultivate the right kind of patina, or sheen of age that is both material and metaphysical. Materiality is one factor working against the obelisk’s consecration; lack of consistent institutional legitimation is another. From the earliest phases of the obelisk project, it was a private endeavor. Vanderbilt put up the money, the Freemasons took over the dedication festivities, and consumer goods businesses dominated the obelisk’s public presentation. Private investment in monumental antiquities is not inherently flawed. Indeed, it was a mix of private and public monies that moved other obelisks from Egypt to Rome, Paris, and Venice. The crucial part is “mix”. These other moves did not rely solely on private funds. Their transitions were
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narrated as public, civic achievements and woven into a discourse. Once Vanderbilt’s monolith was in place and obelisk fever had subsided, it was not clear whose monument it was. Public institutions such as the Met and Columbia College provided scholarly interest and occasional discursive gestures. But there was no coordinated institutional legitimation work to curate the obelisk, financially and symbolically. The obelisk was brought to Central Park as a demonstration of American engineering and business know-how. It was the last of the Egyptian obelisks to be exported, and so came at the tail end of a centuries-long competition for ancient monuments among European nation-states. Moving entire temples and tomb structures showcased naval power and command of inland regions without engaging in actual conflict. The race for monumental antiquities in the 1830s and 1840s had been essential in European states’ constructing a new grammar of diplomacy based on mutual interests in past materiality (Hoock 2010). The United States was never a full participant in the antiquities race. Unlike the British and French agonistic collecting efforts, moreover, the United States did not face sustained political enmity from specific rival states (local-level dissent notwithstanding). This means that engineering spectacle served a different symbolic purpose in 1880s New York than it did in London and Paris fifty years prior. What Vanderbilt, Hurlbert, Gorringe, and the Freemasons wanted was a good show. That is what the obelisk delivered.
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