Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 25

lyn was not the first for Civic Virtue. It once occupied one of the most prominent sites in
New York City, in a large fountain in front of the New York City Hall, before it was removed to Queens in 1941. Civic Virtue was commissioned in 1909, completed in 1920, installed at City Hall
Park in 1922. Nineteen years later it
was packed off to distant Queens. A
statue of Nathan Hale by MacMonnies from 1890 now occupies the
spot that Civic Virtue left vacant,
barred from public access by police
sentries, iron gates and concrete
blast walls. When I was eleven or
twelve, my mother and I were exiled
by collapsing economic fortunes
from Manhattan to Queens. In the
mid 1980’s, newly graduated from
How a r d S k r i ll , C i vi c Vi r tu e T r iu mph a n t O v er
Un r i ght eou sn es s fr om Gr ee n -W ood C em ete ry [ Vi ew fr om
B a ck ] , O i l Pa st el , O i l S ti c k, Pen c il , C ha l k P a st el on Pa pe r,
14 ” x 1 7 ” . ©2 0 15

College, my girlfriend, now my wife,
and I moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Manhattan to Queens to Brooklyn, a

trajectory taken by Civic Virtue and I, although Civic Virtue’s path from borough to borough to borough was much more momentous than my own.
Another video shows workers removing Civic Virtue from its cage in Green-Wood
and placing it just south of its Prospect Park West entrance at the intersection of Garland
and Jasmine avenues.
During the last five years, I have been drawing public statuary in the New York
region for the Anna Pierrepont Series. [To find out more about the series, please visit my
blog, Howardskrill.blogspot.com.] Green-Wood Cemetery is walking distance from my
home and I have visited it more than any other place since I began the series. The series
is named for Anna Marie Pierrepont, one of Green-Wood’s first and most noteworthy
residents interred in a buff colored, Gothic filigreed sarcophagus on one of the highest

Assisi !19