As the largest statue in Manhattan, at 2,800 square feet and set on top of the forty-story Municipal Building, Civic Fame is supported by an interior skeleton of steel and copper branches meant to withstand wind and storm. The figure was assembled, similarly to the Statue of Liberty, in many separate sheets of copper and then fused together to create a smooth, seamless surface. Adolph Alexander Weinman's 25' tall gilded figure of Audrey Munson, who was an American artist's model and film actress, today considered "America's First Supermodel." In her time, she was variously known as "Miss Manhattan", the "Panama–Pacific Girl", the "Exposition Girl" and "American Venus." She was the model or inspiration for more than twelve statues in New York City, and many others elsewhere. Munson was also the first American actress to appear fully nude in the film, Inspiration (1915), the first of her four silent films. It was commissioned by New York City at a cost of $9,000 (equivalent to $233,000 in 2019). The crown also includes dolphins as a symbol of "New York's maritime setting".
She is three times larger than life and gilded which is what you would expect, and her back faces Brooklyn, which is not particularly surprising, either. Audrey Munson, the model after whom she was sculpted, once appeared naked in a porn film (she of the face that launched a thousand quips, she listed herself in a city directory first as an actress, then as an artist) and later was declared insane. All in all, a fitting physical manifestation of the prescient, if decidedly uneasy, consolidation in 1898 of what would become Greater New York. ("Greater" is a geographic term; the City Charter refers only to the City of New York.)The five boroughs are now home to 8.4 million people, but if New Yorkers had not overcome considerable ambivalence, Los Angeles might be the nation's largest city (with 3.8 million), followed by Chicago (2.7 million) and Brooklyn (2.5 million). Manhattan- the original New York, with 1.7 million would rank fifth or sixth, behind Houston and, perhaps, Queens.The bumpy road to consolidation was smoothed earlier in the nineteenth century by the plodding but inevitable imposition of the Manhattan street grid and, later, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1898, Manhattan- the City of New York-merged with the eastern Bronx (the western portion had been annexed in 1874), western Queens County (a year later the county fractured as three towns formed Nassau County), Kings County (Brooklyn) and Staten Island. Westchester demurred. Inauguration of subway service in 1904, followed by construction of arterial highways and additional spans across the East and Harlem Rivers in the twentieth century, welded the tenuous legal framework of conglomeration of the five disparate boroughs into a concrete and cultural reality.Again not surprisingly, the most visible symbols of consolidation can be seen in Manhattan (Brooklyn's 1894 referendum to relinquish its status as a city and jeopardize its Protestant homogeneity passed by a suspect 277 votes of 129,000 cast). There's Albert Weinert's allegorical marble frieze in the Surrogate's Court building, which depicts a youth, symbolizing the new city, flanked by Miss Brooklyn reaching out to Miss New York. But the most visible representation is across the street, atop McKim, Mead & White's beaux arts 580-foot-high Municipal Building. She is called Civic Fame. The twenty-five-foot-tall statue by Adolph A. Weinman, who also worked on Pennsylvania Station and the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, was installed in 1913 at a cost of nine thousand dollars. Standing heroically on a globe, she is described as the city's highest statue and the third largest, after the Statue of Liberty and Jacques Lipchitz's Bellerophon Taming Pegasus on Columbia Law School's facade.Like the Statue of Liberty, the 985-square-foot figure, which weighs 2,500 pounds, is fashioned from hammered copper on an iron frame. Barefoot, she holds a shield with the city's coat of arms (it plunged through a skylight in 1936 but was restored) and a laurel branch in her right hand and a mural crown crenelated by five turrets, symbolizing the five boroughs, in her left. Dolphins represent the city's maritime heritage.In her eighth decade and suffering from exposure, the statue was removed, restored, and regilded with hand-burnished 23.5-karat gold leaf, and hoisted back into position by helicopter in 1991. That was only four years before Audrey Munson died in an upstate asylum, just short of her 105th birthday. Munson's placid but purposeful face is everywhere, guarding the Maine monument near Columbus Circle and leading General Sherman in Grand Army Plaza. "If the name of Miss Manhattan belongs to anyone in particular," the New York Sun wrote, “it is to this young woman.” TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
