Early into his second term, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $10 million initiative, led by his wife, that would break the bronze ceiling by introducing seven new statues of historical women to New York City’s commemorative landscape of mostly men. It was to be one of Mr. de Blasio’s signature marks on the landscape.
Days from the end of his administration, with only $1 million dedicated, none of those sculptures has yet materialized.
— The New York Times
The failure mirrors de Blasio’s much-hyped but ultimately fruitless promise to remove some $1 billion from the police budget, which critics say was an insincere attempt to assuage the Black Lives Matter movement at a time when activists were taking to the streets nationwide to protest the killings of unarmed Black men.
The monuments were another area of unfulfilled administrative posturing about groups of people and neighborhoods that are not the benefactors of effective public spending. This came at a time when state officials were dedicating successive monuments in areas more often associated with financial services such as Battery Park City. The issue comes down to funding priorities, according to Stony Brook University historian Michelle H. Bogart.
“The problem is that maintenance and conservation are not sexy,” she told the New York Times. “Works in those communities don’t necessarily have ready constituencies who will raise money for the upkeep of older monuments.”
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