Major General Ulysses S. Grant is remembered at several locations in New York City. Grant’s Tomb is the most famous memorial, but the often ignored Grant Statue in Brooklyn is one of the oldest equestrian representations of the general and president. I stopped by Grant Square on the 155th Anniversary of Grant’s July 4, 1863 victory at Vicksburg to take a few pictures.
Grant Statue Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Grant Statue was the brainchild of the Union League Club of Brooklyn. The club was located on Grant Square, where Bedford and Rogers Avenues come together. It was installed in 1896.
The statue was sculpted by William Ordway Partridge, whose statues of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Tilden stand in New York.
The statue was restored a quarter century ago and is in good shape. Grant Square itself has no historical interpretive signage, even though it contains several points of historic and architectural interest.
Here is a shot of the statue with the Union League building in the background. The historic photo is from the NY Public Library collection.
Here is another historic photo, likely from the early 1900s. You can see that the statue was not on a traffice island, as it is now, it was simply set on the street. Not too problematic when your traffic is mostly horse drawn, as this scene shows. [Source of photo]
On the immediate right of the statue is the Union League Club in the photo above..
The building behind Grant can be seen in the two historic photos.
You can get a sense of the size of this statue by seeing the cars next to it.
Under the horses tail is the dedication from the Union League:
The little piece of land that is there is called the “Grant Gore.” I had never heard this term before, but it means a small triangular piece of land. This little traffic island is a small triangular piece of land.
This is a photo of the April 24th 1896 unveiling. Tens of thousands of people participated on a rainy day. Julia Grant was in attendance, Horace Porter gave the keynote and little Ulysses Grant III pulled the cord.
You can see the 23rd regiment armory in the background with its turret. A hotel is in the near background. Both buildings are still there.
The Gore has a small wildflower garden and some small trees, but there is nowhere to sit. Another disadvantage is that unless one stands in the street, it is difficult to fully take in the statue. While the arch at Grand Army Plaza is a viewing delight, the placement of Grant on what is now a very busy intersection with vehicles travelling in excess of 40 mph makes this less than optimal.
Here is the Gore Park which is as narrow as five feet wide and opens out to about 30 feet wide. Some nice stuff, but kinda weedy.
You can get a sense of the quality of the old 1880s residential buildings. This is a half block from the gore.
Below is the old Hotel Chaterlaine, which is across the street from the statue. Part of the hotel is visible in the dedication picture.
Here is a large residence visible in the historical photos that still is intact:
The Union League Club (below), built in the 1880s, is now a senior center. The city should invest in outdoor seating so folks aren’t bringing old couches outside.
The Union League has a lovely terra cotta of Lincoln over the door:
He is flanked by Grant, of course.
The cornerstone of the Union League building:
As is typical of these grand old buildings, there is amazing stonework:
You can see from this picture that the watchtower that once was on the building has been removed.
Grant is looking down the block at the armory of the 23rd regiment. This is not the 23rd NYVI from the Southern Tier in western NY. It is the militia regiment which saw action during Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. The armory is of the post-war castle design adopted after the draft riots.
The huge building is now a homeless shelter and, while well maintained, is uninviting.
The Imperial Hotel across from the homeless shelter is a reminder of the contrasts one can find on a city street.
On February 13, at the Union League Club of Brooklyn, New York, Douglass delivered an hour-long tribute to Abraham Lincoln. At this annual birthday commemoration of Lincoln, three hundred Republicans gathered for an elaborate banquet amid “bunting, flags and flowers, and a fine oil painting of the martyred President,” as reported in the press.
Introduced to a prolonged ovation, Douglass served up his share of Lincoln legend. But he never spoke publicly about the sixteenth president without a political purpose that served the cause of black freedom or civil rights. In this atmosphere of mystic hero worship Douglass called Lincoln “godlike” and the greatest American who “ever stood or walked upon the continent.” Douglass placed Lincoln in the line of classic heroes, those who had been tested in crisis and led nations through their “darkest hours.” Douglass had this audience of Gilded Age New Yorkers in the palm of his hand: “The time to see a great captain is not when the wind is fair and the sea is smooth, and the man in the cross-trees . . . can safely sing out, ‘All is well.’ At such a time a pigmy may seem a giant. . . . You must see him when the sky is dark . . . see him in the hour of danger . . . when his ship is in distress.” Because he had taken the country through its worst storm, Lincoln was “such a captain” and a “hero worthy of your highest worship.” How dearly in the 1890s, the orator implied, the nation needed such a captain now.
The image of the savior Lincoln characterized much Lincoln oratory. But Douglass put it to his own ends: “I had the good fortune to know Abraham Lincoln personally and peculiarly.” The “peculiar” element was the black man welcomed without racist pretension at the White House. Douglass thus brought attention to his own prominence, relishing the tales of his meetings with Lincoln and his pride of place in history, which is what almost every Yankee did who knew Lincoln. But it was also a commentary on the racism deep in so many human relationships all over America. Douglass was fond of using Lincoln’s ability to “make me at ease” as a metaphor for the possibility of equality in race relations. Gone in this speech were any “stepchildren” metaphors, used so brilliantly in 1876; gone also were any identifications with Pan-Africanism or refrains about “when Haiti spoke.” Instead, he returned to the idea of a composite America: “I have seen both sides of this great world. I have seen men of all conditions . . . high and low, rich and poor, slave and free, white and black.” Douglass used Lincoln to appeal to human unity. “I feel it more to be a man and a member of the great human family,” he announced, “than to be a member of any one of the many varieties of the human race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-African, or any other.”35 In this his last public Lincoln eulogy, it was as if Douglass imagined that the pernicious exhibition of human types about to be displayed on the Chicago Midway could be refuted by a vision of human unity forged through the prairie politician who overcame his roots and saved the Union.
The Chicago Haiti speech and the Brooklyn Lincoln speech, though they seem so different, were not opposite stories for Douglass. Even if stretching the threads of history a bit, they were a way of linking Toussaint and Lincoln as different kinds of liberators, different providential actors in an apocalyptic historical trajectory; portraits of both figures hung in prominent places in Douglass’s parlor at Cedar Hill. Nation making needed blood sacrifice and even martyrdom. If the times demanded the model of Haiti as a black republic, they needed even more the legacy of a reinvented American republic and the life and death of Lincoln in whose blood symbolically a new country was born. In national memory, blacks now needed Lincoln as he now needed them. But the symbolic Lincoln could do nothing about a collapsing economy. A mere three weeks before Grover Cleveland’s second inauguration, three major American railroads went under, and before long some five hundred banks and fifteen thousand companies would fail in the devastating Panic of 1893.
This was a wonderful article. So many hidden historical treasures in Brooklyn!
Thanks Mike.
Excellent post and photo spread. The site does indeed lie in a neighborhood largely unvisited by outsiders, an one that a few decades ago was genuinely dangerous. I was happy to hear that the monument and at least some of the surrounding buildings are being kept up.
Thanks Fergus.
This is some nice history with pictures. Thanks for sharing it.
I was a resident at the Bedford-Atlantic Men’s Shelter, and Sumner House shelter down Marcus Garvey Boulevard in the early late 80’s and early ’90’s. Gore Grant was a frequent stopping place to rest in my travels from the library, museum and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens at Grand Army Plaza. I survived dangerous incidents under the gaze of General Grant, but my impression of the statue still remains: what a grand edifice to place so close to a city shelter!
Fabulous!!!
In San Francisco they ripped down the General ‘s bust.