Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 24

CIVIC VIRTUE

Howard Skrill

[Dedicated to the memory of Jean Cabut, Georges Wolinski, Bernard Verlhac and
Philippe Honore]
On December 15th, 2012, work crews assembled on a public plaza in front of
Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens in order to truss up and lift ‘Civic Virtue Triumphant Over Unrighteousness’, an enormous marble sculpture, from its perch in a fountain between Queens Boulevard,
the Van Wyck Expressway and
Union Turnpike. Civic Virtue had
occupied this spot for seventy one
years. In early January 2015, I
watched a YouTube video of the
event made by an impassioned
opponent of the work’s removal.
The workmen labored into the
night to secure the enormous
monument into a cage constructed of steel girders that was then
hoisted by a crane onto a flatbed
truck that ferried it to GreenWood Cemetery near my home in
Park Slope, Brooklyn. I was struck
by the image of C ]