What should replace Baltimore’s Christopher Columbus statue? Ideas abound and memories linger.

What should replace the Christopher Columbus statue that was dumped in Baltimore’s harbor more than four years ago?

A replica of the statue that was destroyed? A sculpture depicting a family of Italian immigrants? A likeness of former U. S. House of Representatives Speaker (and Baltimore native) Nancy Pelosi or her father, former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr.? Mother Cabrini? An olive tree? Or maybe nothing at all.

Those were a few of the ideas suggested during a spirited discussion this month at a meeting of the Little Italy Neighborhood Association (LINA), a community group whose members live and work near the spot where the statue was dedicated in 1984 — with then-President Ronald Reagan in attendance.

Located near President Street and Eastern Avenue, across from Pier 6 and near the entrance to Scarlett Place, the marble statue was torn down by a group of protestors on July 4, 2020, as part of the nationwide George Floyd protests. The protestors lassoed the top of the statue and yanked it off its base, causing it to break into pieces. Then they rolled the body of the statue and other fragments to the inlet near where the Lower Jones Falls meets the Inner Harbor, and threw the pieces into the water. No one was ever arrested. It was one of numerous incidents in which statues and other civic monuments were felled around the country that summer.

What’s left today is a large octagonal pedestal, which supported the statue and is now fenced off to the public, and a landscaped plaza surrounded by more than a dozen flag poles, each bearing the Italian flag. The empty pedestal stands as a reminder of the events of four years ago.

Carved from Italian Carrara marble by sculptor Mauro Bigarani, the statue and base together were 14 feet tall. The marble base bears inscriptions and artwork related to Columbus and his voyage in 1492, including depictions of the three ships in his fleet, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. One of the inscriptions, visible through a black metal fence, reads:

DEDICATED TO THE CITY OF BALTIMORE BY THE ITALIAN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION UNITED OF MARYLAND AND THE ITALIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY OF BALTIMORE IN COMMEMORATION OF THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

OCTOBER 12, 1984

WILLIAM DONALD SCHAEFER

MAYOR OF BALTIMORE.

50 years ago this month

The meeting was held at the Sons of Italy Lodge on East Pratt Street, fittingly, on Oct. 14 — one day after the federal holiday known for years as Columbus Day, now celebrated in Baltimore as Indigenous Peoples’ Day after the Baltimore City Council voted in 2020 to rename the holiday. It was almost exactly 50 years after the statue was dedicated by Reagan and Schaefer.

The discussion started with an appearance by John Pica, president of the Italian American Organization United of Maryland, the group that commissioned the 1984 statue and invited Reagan to Baltimore for the dedication. Officers at that time included Carl Julio, Dominic Aversa and Anthony Piccinini.

A former state senator who was born on South Exeter Street in Little Italy, Pica told the LINA members that his group has created a replica of the statue that was broken into pieces, after fishing two-thirds of the head and other chunks of the original figure out of the water, but has been unable find a home for it. He said the replica won’t go up on the empty pedestal in Little Italy, given what happened before, and his group is exploring other options.

“We have to find a place to put that statue,” he said. “Quite frankly, we offered it to Father [Bernard] Carman [at St. Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church in Little Italy], who is afraid of the controversy. We’ve offered it to others. They really don’t want the controversy. So we’re really looking for an appropriate place to put it.”

Sculptor chosen

Besides searching for a home for the replacement statue, Pica said at the LINA meeting, members of his group believe that something should be done with the empty pedestal that held the original statue. And he’s willing to start the conversation: If a new Columbus statue isn’t going there, what would be a fitting replacement?

Pica said his group has had meetings with City Council member Zeke Cohen and others about the empty pedestal and what should go there, and hired a sculptor. Although planners have come up with some preliminary ideas, he said, he and others in his group wanted residents of the larger Little Italy community to be part of the discussions and decision-making process, and that’s why he came to the LINA meeting.

From the early talks, he said, “we decided it came down to two individuals who would be represented on the replacement statue. Columbus is not one of them. It was Mother Cabrini or an anonymous Italian immigrant. And it was the consensus of a group of about 25 to 30 individuals that the anonymous Italian immigrant would replace Columbus. Since then, we have had other options suggested,” including having both a man and a woman. For one, LINA president Lisa Regnante “wants to make sure there’s a woman on that pedestal,” he said.

To create a new work of art, Pica said, his group has selected Sebastian Martorana (sebastianworks.com), a local artist who has a master’s degree from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art and whose work has been shown at the Walters Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and many other places.

A new sculpture could cost $100,000 to $200,000 or more. Pica said his group’s fundraising committee includes a number of prominent Italian Americans, including Dr. Thomas Scalea from the University of Maryland Medical System’s R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center; developers Tom Bozzuto and Lawrence Julio; and many others. Working with Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, Pica said, the group has secured a $40,000 state grant to create a new work of art, and raised another $4,750.

“We’ve provided a deposit to Mr. Martorana and we’re on our way to raising the money,” Pica said. “We’re going to be able to raise the money. The question is: what goes on that pedestal?”

Piazza d’Italia

Pica and Martorana were introduced at the meeting by Regnante, who has been part of the preliminary discussions. She told the audience that while no final decisions have been made about the art work itself, the planners have made one decision: they want to rename the area where the Columbus statue stood, in a way that celebrates Little Italy more.

“We did decide that it would no longer be called Columbus Plaza, that we would call it Little Italy Piazza or Piazza d’Italia,” she said. “We knew we were going to name it something that would connect the historic district with land that was always part of Little Italy. Scarlett Place used to be land of Little Italy. Now we have to decide what is going to be the replacement.”

Besides making a decision about what form the new art should take, Regnante and Pica said, another question for the community to consider is whether the existing base should remain, with its Columbus-related inscriptions and images.

If the pedestal stays in place, would the inscriptions and carvings on its sides conflict with the subject matter of a new work of art? And would its dimensions limit the size of the replacement work of art?  

“The base held one statue. Is it big enough to hold more than one statue?” Regnante asked. “If we want to replace it with one statue, is it a male? Is it a female? Who is it going to represent?”

Regnante said there’s been some talk about creating a sculpture that depicts “an anonymous family, an immigrant family, something that Italians were a part of, other ethnic groups that came to Baltimore.” She mentioned a sculpture in Connecticut that replaced a Columbus statue there as a possible precedent for Little Italy to consider.

The Connecticut sculpture depicts an immigrant family and “it’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s a mother, a father. The father’s holding a little boy. He’s looking up towards the future. The little girl is holding a hand with the mother. That’s a figure that someone, or everyone, can see themselves or a family member. If we do more than one figure, can it fit on the base? And if it doesn’t, where does the base go? These are all of the questions that are swirling around.”

‘Columbus was what we did’

For the groups that raised money to commission Baltimore’s Columbus statue in the 1980s, this was a very important project, Regnante said.

“These are organizations that are now based in the county,” she said. “Many of [the members] either grew up here in Little Italy or have some kind of connection to Little Italy. It was their parents or their siblings who helped raise money for that statue, and it was a big deal. If you’re not Italian, I’m not going to get into the whole Columbus statue [saga]. But…as an Italian on both sides, Columbus was what we did. On Columbus Day, we celebrated being Italian and all that came with it – the culture, the language, the music. We called it Columbus Day, but I think we celebrated everything that was good about being Italian.”

Regnante said she remembers when Baltimore had a Columbus Day parade.

“There used to be a parade and I marched in it,” she said. “When I was a student in college in Washington, D. C., we came down with an Italian-American youth group and we marched in the parade. So now we don’t have our parade. Don’t have a statue. We need to talk about how do we revitalize that piazza in a way that we can still take pride as Italian-Americans, as Little Italy, but make sure that it’s something that everybody can celebrate.”

The Monumental City

Martorana, 43, is adept at both stone carving and wood carving. He told the audience he believes the piazza would be an appropriate place for another stone sculpture.

“I think that statue should be replaced with another marble sculpture,” he said. “It’s been a long time since Baltimore had a new monumental marble carving. You may know that Baltimore was once referred to as The Monumental City. That is because it housed the three primary monumental sculptors [in the nation’s early years]. I’d like to be part of that tradition. I think it’s an opportunity to do something new and update the space and create something everyone can be proud of – and that, hopefully, will never get defaced again.”

One of the most recent statues erected in Baltimore is sculptor Rodney Carroll’s bronze figure of former Mayor and Governor William Donald Schaefer. It was donated by businessman Willard Hackerman and installed on the west shore of the Inner Harbor in 2009, two years before Schaefer’s death.

Other local statues include Joseph Sheppard’s depiction of former Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson with a golden glove, located outside Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and Reuben Kramer’s statue of former U. S. Supreme Court justice and Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall, outside the Edward A. Garmatz United States District Courthouse. A statue of former Mayor Clarence “Du” Burns, Baltimore’s first African-American mayor, has been proposed but not realized.

‘Stepping from the harbor’

Martorana said the top of the pedestal in Little Italy measures “just over 40 inches” across, which could be enough to accommodate one figure or more than one, depending how they’re spaced.  It’s “not insubstantial, in terms of its size,” he said. “You could certainly fit two adults standing close to each other.”

Another question: what direction should a new statue face?

As he has been exploring ideas about multiple adult figures, Martorana said, “I…think that it would be interesting to allow the figures themselves to extend beyond the edge of the base, in a very intentional way, to allow the figures to look as though they are stepping from the harbor,” as if they’re just coming to America.

In many urban settings where a statue rises along a waterfront, he said, the figure tends to be oriented to face the water, the way Schaefer’s statue gestures towards the Inner Harbor. “In this case, that should be reversed,” he said. “We should have the figures facing and moving in the direction of Little Italy. So I think that the footprint of the pedestal itself doesn’t present…a limitation. It’s just a matter of being creative with the configuration of the figures.”

The cost of creating more than one figure would be a key consideration, Regnante said.

“I know that we talked about it: the more figures, the more cost,” she said. “It’s a substantial cost as it is, because we’re going to have to be part of the fundraising. But if we can figure out something that everybody is good with, that everybody likes, even if it costs more, I think we can really work hard and get the money for it.”

Fencing is yet another consideration. When the statue was originally put in place, Regnante said, the fence was relatively low, only surrounding the bottom of the pedestal.  After the statue was ripped down, a higher fence was installed around the base, with a padlock to prevent entry. But how would people react, she said, to the “optics of putting an immigrant family in a fence?”

Another worry related to the pedestal: Would there be confusion if the Columbus-oriented pedestal stayed and a non-Columbus-oriented sculpture was placed on top? Would the vandals who destroyed the statue come back and try to destroy the original base? Would a non Columbus-themed work of art become a target simply because it’s positioned on the original base?

In any discussion about a new sculpture, “we’re going to end up talking about the Columbus base” if it remains, Regnante said. “It would be hard if we had the Columbus base and something else on top, not to mention the base. That’s what I’m worried about: people thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t get it. Let’s go back and get the base.’ We just can’t protect it.”

Removing such a large and heavy base would be expensive, Pica warned.

“It’s going to cost thousands of dollars,” he said. It “weighs several tons. We’d have to hire a crane company to move it. We’d have to insure it. We’d have to transport it. We’d have to find a home for it. Then we’d have to hire another crane company to put it where’s it’s going to go. It’s going to cost a lot of money.”

‘A pack of punks’

When the subject was opened up to the room for discussion, LINA members had a wide range of reactions to what they’d heard. Some recalled the events of 2020, when the crowd gathered starting in the afternoon and the statue was torn down in broad daylight.

Carol Richman, a resident of Scarlett Place, said she’s concerned about the base getting damaged if it stays in place.

“I think the base is a problem,” she said. “I worry that the same thing would happen again to…whatever is put there. The people who did that are very active and I fear that they would come back and do that again.”

“It was a pack of punks who did it, between the ages of 18 and 25,” Pica said.

“We actually watched this happen,” Richman said. “We saw the whole group. Hundreds of people.”

“Hundreds of people,” Pica agreed. “With the Baltimore City police watching.”

“Two. There were two officers,” Richman said.

“There were actually more than that,” Pica said. “They were across the street.”

“There were two patrol cars parked near there,” Richman said. “They could do nothing. There were hundreds of these people, so I fear that that same thing would happen again if the pedestal is still there.”

Pica said the incident was well documented.

“We actually provided the names of suspects and individuals and photographs,” Pica said. “The police department refused to do anything about it.”

Bernard C. “Jack” Young was Baltimore’s mayor when the statue was destroyed, and Marilyn Mosby was the State’s Attorney of Baltimore. Neither is still in office. Young was in the final months of his term that summer, having already been defeated in the 2020 primary election by Brandon Scott, who became Mayor that December. Mosby has been replaced by Ivan Bates and is currently serving a home detention sentence after being convicted of perjury and mortgage fraud.

Compatible styles?

One LINA member asked if Martorana’s work would be compatible with the design of the pedestal, if it stayed in place. “What is Sebastian’s style and is that style going to meld sitting on top of an elevated platform like that?”

The artist said he’d like to think so.  

“My undergraduate degree is from Syracuse University,” he said. “I have a degree in illustration. I was a painter before I was a sculptor. I actually still teach in the illustration department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. During my undergrad [years], I studied in Italy for a little while and that’s when I decided I wanted to become a stone carver. So my background and training traditionally as an artist is in figurative work. I was an apprentice at a stone shop outside of D. C.  during my undergraduate and for three years after it and that’s when I came to Baltimore to go to graduate school here at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Institute.”

Basically, “my entire career since then has been as an illustrator,” he said. “I just happen to be working in three dimensions, in stone. My own interest in work kind of varies, but…I think of it as representational. I tend to be more interested in objects and things that represent people, humans, the experiences that we all share, largely through objects. However, my background is in figurative work. I’m not sure if that exactly answers your question, but I’d like to think that, based on my background as an illustrator and my current career as an artist, I’m able to accommodate pretty much anything, whatever is necessary for the project.”

As far as the question of whether the pedestal stays or goes, he said, he believes that “is really one for the community” to decide.

“It’s not a simple cut-and-dry…situation,” Regnante said of the pedestal and the raised circular area around it. “One of the things we talked about was having a statue that’s not raised [on a pedestal] but is on the raised circle. So it is on the circle but it’s on the ground where you can have interactions with it.  In Annapolis, they have the [Kunte Kinte-Alex] Haley statue, and people do put their arms around it.”

Regnante said one of LINA’s goals is to create public places that give people reasons to appreciate they’re in Little Italy, and replacing the statue would be a good opportunity for that.

“This is what we’re trying to do, all the different things that we’re involved with – trying to create Instagram-able moments where people say, Hey, I’m in Little Italy. Look at this, it’s cool!” she said.

‘A bit of a flashpoint’

Talking about possible statue subjects again, Pica said former U. S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been suggested.

“Nancy Pelosi was my baby sitter,” he said.  “And nobody around me said a bad word about her, because they’re going to hear from me. But she’s a bit of a flashpoint. So I have no problem doing it. Others will have to voice their opinions.”

A statue of Pelosi’s father, former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., has also been considered but not necessarily for the pedestal. Pica noted that there are two statues of D’Alesandro in Charles Center, one seated and one standing, on a plaza outside the One Charles Center office building at 100 N. Charles St. that attorney Peter Angelos owned before he died in March. Pica said he tried to contact Angelos’s sons about moving at least one of them to Little Italy.

“I had a hard time reaching John and Louis [Angelos] to see if they’ll donate one of those statues to the piazza,” he said, adding that he hasn’t given up. “We’re not going to stop trying to contact them until we hear whether they want to give it to us or not. So I don’t think there will be a statue of…Congresswoman Pelosi but we do have two statues that are drawing cobwebs up at the old Charles Center, of Mayor D’Alesandro, who’s known as Big Tommy, that we would like to put in the piazza.”

Since the death of Peter Angelos, One Charles Center has been sold to a buyer who plans to keep the building as office space, and the D’Alesandro statues remain in Charles Center for now.

An olive tree

Teresa Lenzenweger, treasurer and “membership person” at the Sons of Italy Lodge, suggested a work of art that doesn’t depict a person.

“I was just curious if any discussion has been had about making the statue more symbolic, without using people,” she said. “I just came from Italy. They have beautiful sculptures of olive trees, where the roots are showing, which is very symbolic. And of course, olive trees — you certainly can’t gain any negative implications from an olive tree. And no particular groups of people are left out.”

“That’s a good point, a very good point,” Pica said. “I would prefer a fig tree, but…”

In addition to a sculpture by Martorana, he said, his group envisions placing a plaque on the grounds to honor others who inhabited the land that became Little Italy, and another one to recognize those who were behind the art work.

“Little Italy wasn’t always inhabited by Italians,” he said. “It was inhabited by native Americans at one time.” In addition, he said, many African Americans lived in the Flag House Courts public housing towers and low-rise apartments that bordered Little Italy, and people of many different backgrounds worked in the restaurants and other businesses in the community.

“Different constituencies that inhabited this land will be recognized in a plaque, a plaque separate from the plaque [acknowledging] the Italians who worked to get that statue there in the early 1980s and presently,” he said.

Nothing at all?

One of the most outspoken residents at the meeting was Elia Mannetta, first president of the Little Italy lodge and founding president of the Little Italy Community Organization, a precursor of LINA.

Mannetta said he was involved in the creation of the 1984 statue and was incensed when it was dumped in the harbor. He remains disappointed that no one was ever arrested.

Mannetta said he doesn’t believe it’s the right time to try to put anything on the pedestal, and he doesn’t think the time will be right until the vandals who took down the original statue are brought to justice. He said he would rather see the piazza stay the way it is – with an empty pedestal at the center – as a reminder of what happened in 2020 and a blemish on the city.

“Johnny, I appreciate what you’re doing, what you’ve done,” he started out saying to Pica. “I don’t question your capabilities in putting something there. If you do end up doing a statue of an immigrant family, there’s a famous photo from the Smithsonian…of a mother, father and a child looking at the Statue of Liberty from a ship. It’s a classic photo.”

But then he got to his point, and warned about trying to fill the void.

“I think that putting any type of a statue in that piazza in this moment is premature because…that statue — the lack of that statue there — says every day what kind of city, what kind of mayor we have, okay? It’s a disgrace to the United States. It’s a remembrance of the stupidity of people and everything.”

Given what happened in 2020, and the lack of follow-through by the police department, Mannetta said, he doesn’t think any replacement would be well-received right now.

“My feeling is that I don’t think the people would take kindly to any statue going on there,” he said. “When I’m referring to the people, I’m referring to people like myself, from Little Italy…My mother was the one who developed a cover for the statue, under Secret Service orders, so they knew that President Reagan would not be poisoned by any type of elements on the statue or anything.”

‘They basically ordered them’

Two city police officers attended the LINA meeting and sat silently while others discussed the statue replacement proposal and the police department’s response in 2020. Mannetta interrupted his remarks to say he doesn’t fault the police officers who were sitting behind him at the LINA meeting.

The police officers who were on the scene in 2020 “did not want to be there in a stand-down situation,” he said. “They were ordered.”

“You are correct about that,” Pica said. “The police officers we’ve talked to wanted to do something about it.”

“They were frustrated. Crying and everything,” Mannetta said. “So, there’s the problem. No one has been convicted. No one. No charges…They basically ordered them. As [eyewitnesses] can tell you, they knew that this was going to happen, something was going to happen. So my feeling is that I think that the studying of doing a statue and placed somewhere is excellent, okay, but that until times change a little bit, I think that [pedestal] should remain the way it is, as a memory of what was done.”

Mannetta noted that besides being called The Monumental City, Baltimore is the only city that had three statues to Christopher Columbus.

“We were the only city in the world with three monuments to Columbus,” he said. “The first one in 1792, by a Frenchman that was donated by France to Baltimore. The second one in 1892 in Clifton Park. The first one is on Harford [Road.]  And this was third statue, here.”

Many of the people who were so proud of the third Columbus statue aren’t likely to be happy with anything else as a replacement, Mannetta warned. “You’re going to get pushback… on putting anything there that is not one of the Columbus statues. I’m just telling you right now.”

Pica said he respects the rank-and-file police officers in the city.

“Let me first iterate my respect for the police department,” he said. “It was the leadership, not the rank-and-file members of the police department,” who made the decision not to arrest anyone when the statue was thrown in the harbor. He said he spoke to several individuals, “in particular a sergeant who wanted to do something but could not. We were also dealing with a prosecutor, at the time it was Marilyn Mosby, who was not going to prosecute.”

Pica and Mannetta talked about the origins of Columbus Day in America and Pica led a round of applause for the police officers in the room.

“’Let me say ‘thank you’ to the police department for the work you gentlemen and ladies do,” he said.

Valuable discussion

After more than half an hour, Pica thanked the LINA members for their attention and suggestions, and asked when the group’s next meeting will be. He promised to share drawings that Martorana creates to show what might be possible.

“All of these are great ideas,” he said. “We’re happy to come back after your November meeting…There’s still time to think about it.”

Pica said he’d like to know what LINA members think about the pedestal and the fence as well as possibilities for the sculpture itself.

“I think LINA should have a very robust conversation about whether the pillar should be removed, and the fence removed,” Pica said “Your opinion is very important.”

As president of the group exploring the options, he said, he’s certain about one aspect of the project: “There’s going to be an Italian on that land. I can guarantee that.”

Regnante agreed that LINA’s members have some important decisions to make.

“This is going to be an ongoing discussion,” she said. “This replacement is going to probably be a replacement for the next 100 years or more, so whatever we do, we want to do it right.”