9.11.06

Around the corner and two blocks up, in Riverside Park, is New York City's Firemen's Memorial, dedicated in 1913 and, according to the Parks Department's site, "one of the most impressive monuments in New York City."

For those of you who may not be quite as familiar with New York, this provides the context:

"Riverside Drive stretches along Riverside Park and the Hudson River from West 72nd Street to Dyckman Street. When New York started expanding northward, the City acquired land, in 1866-67, for a park and scenic drive between the Hudson River Railroad and the rocky bluffs along the river. The original 1875 plan, by Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of Central Park, called for a park with a picturesque drive winding along the natural contours of the land. Twenty-five years later, the result was an English-style rustic park and a formal tree-lined boulevard.

"A fashionable address at the turn of the 20th century, Riverside Drive attracted a collection of substantial neoclassical apartment houses and mansions along its eastern side. The Drive’s majestic elevation also made it an impressive location for colossal monuments and institutions, including Grant’s Tomb (1897) and Riverside Church (1930). The Firemen’s Memorial is one of more than a dozen monuments along Riverside Drive, including sculptures of Franz Sigel (1907), Joan of Arc (1915), Samuel Tilden (1926), Lajos Kossuth (1930), and Eleanor Roosevelt (1996)."

As for the monument itself, it's a grand, imposing, and complex assemblage.  Note the reference to horse-drawn fire wagons:

"Though originally intended for the north end of Union Square, the monument was ultimately built on the hillside facing the Hudson River at 100th Street. The memorial comprises a grand staircase (once flanked by ornamental luminaires), a balustraded plaza, a fountain basin, and the central monument. Made of Knoxville marble, the monument is a sarcophagus-like structure with a massive bas-relief of horses drawing an engine to a fire (the original was replaced by a bronze replica in the 1950s); to the south and north are allegorical sculpture groups representing “Duty” and “Sacrifice,” for which the celebrated model Audrey Munson (1891-1996) is said to have posed.

"The memorial exemplifies a classical grandeur that characterized several civic monuments built in New York City from the 1890s to World War I, as part of an effort dubbed the City Beautiful Movement, which was meant to improve the standard of urban public design and achieve an uplifting union of art and architecture. This monument has twice undergone extensive restoration, once in the late 1930s, through a W.P.A.-sponsored conservation program, and more recently through a $2 million city-funded capital project completed in 1992."

Since September 11, 2001, the Fire Department has held annual memorial services there on the anniversary of the event, when its lost 343 firefighters, its worst loss by far on a single day.