Memorials and Monuments

Utica’s Olmsted system contains a number of monuments, predominantly concentrated on the westernmost half mile of the Parkway, which was built in 1909. Several of these monuments were created by noted American artists, and three on the Parkway commemorate the largest immigrant groups in early twentieth century Utica (the Germans, the Poles, and the Italians). Some of the newer monuments commemorate the wars of the twentieth century.

The dedication of monuments on the Parkway came about unintentionally. The first such monument was the Swan Memorial Fountain, which will be discussed below; it was installed in 1910 at the then recently completed eastern terminus of the first half mile of the Parkway. Four years later, the local German American community erected a statue to one of their heroes, Baron von Steuben, and thus began a process of periodically adding monuments.

Today, that first stretch of the Parkway is full of monuments, and only a small amount of suitable space remains for this purpose; east of the Swan Memorial Fountain and up to Clementian Street, the topography of the Parkway becomes hillier and the lawn broader, and overall, it is not suitable for monuments such as those one finds more to the west.