Christopher Columbus

This was the last of three monuments to be erected on the Parkway by Utica’s three largest twentieth century immigrant groups (the others are the von Steuben and Pulaski statues). The Columbus statue was originally erected in 1952 by Italian Americans on Oriskany Boulevard in downtown Utica, at the entry to the old Italian district known as East Utica, and it was then moved to its current location on the Parkway in 1966. It was designed by Enrico Arrighini and cast by Marmi Arrighini, a firm established in Pietrasanta, Province of Lucca, Italy, in 1870, whose works are found in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan.

Controversies in recent times regarding allegations about the man, Christopher Columbus, have led some communities to remove or at least consider removing monuments to him. Some commentary about Utica’s Columbus statue therefore seems to be in order.

This statue was erected by local Italian Americans when neither they nor the American public were aware of the allegations now made against Columbus, which became widely known beginning only in the 1990s. In addition, honoring Columbus was not an idea that originated among the immigrants, who came from southern Italy, a place where Columbus, a northern Italian, was not widely known at the time (there are virtually no monuments to him in southern Italy, and most of the immigrants had very little, if any, formal education).

Instead, Italian immigrants and their children had been encouraged for decades by the American public, beginning with President Benjamin Harrison in the early 1890s, to consider Columbus an appropriate symbol of their simultaneous ties to the US and Italy.  They were led to believe that Americans might respect them more if they associated themselves with this supposedly great man, the “discoverer” of American, to whom Americans had dedicated a major national celebration in 1892-93.

Most importantly, the statue was erected as a symbol of Italian pride after decades of hateful anti-Italian discrimination. The baldly discriminatory immigration laws enacted in the 1920s and still in force in the 1950s and 1960s were purposely designed to keep Italians out of the United States. Those laws were based on the widespread, fundamentally racist belief that Southern Italian immigrants were genetically inferior, a danger to American democracy, and therefore undesirable.

In short, the statue was dedicated by local Italians not to demean anyone but to elevate themselves at a time when they were themselves being demeaned, and they had no reason to believe that a monument to Columbus would offend anyone. For this reason, Utica’s statue remains where it has been for over a half century, a monument to the Italian immigrants who helped to build Utica rather than to the man Columbus.  We respectfully offer these reflections so that visitors and residents alike can consider the monument in historical context and the lesson it offers about the scourges of discrimination and racism, not to mention the shifting currents of historic esteem.