The Eagle

One of the locally better known and more significant of the local monuments, the statue known simply as “The Eagle” (1929), which is located at a viewing area (once known as “the Plateau”) atop Roscoe Conkling Park that was intentionally created by Olmsted to offer a dramatic vista of the city and the surrounding Mohawk Valley.

The Eagle was commissioned by Maria Watson Williams Proctor to memorialize her husband.  On a previous July 4, Thomas Proctor had been given a bald eagle, but he decided to liberate it, and Proctor then died July 4, 1920.  His wife considered this a fitting monument to her husband, whom she loved and admired, and with whom she had been a partner in at least some of the family’s park-building initiatives (notably, F.T. Proctor Park, as well as Watson Williams Park, which she built in partnership with her sister, Rachel).

The Eagle was designed by noted American sculptor Charles Keck (1875-1951), who apprenticed under renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Keck was responsible for the exterior reliefs on the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the gates of Columbia University, and monumental public statues found in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, New York City, Toronto, and the Capitol in Washington, DC (specifically the statue of Louisiana governor Huey Long).

Keck also created the famous sculpture of Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama, and the statue of Father Duffy in the middle of New York’s Times Square, as well as the Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Pan-American gold commemorative dollar coin (1915), and the Battle of Bennington Sesquicentennial dollar (1927).

Utica is home to another, smaller Keck work, a decorative plate cast from metal salvaged from the U.S.S. Maine, which can be found on the pedestal of “The Hiker,” (1915) the statue commemorating the Spanish American War that can be found at the intersection of the Parkway and Oneida Street.

An early view of the Eagle, from around 1940.