Christopher Columbus never knew where he was going, so perhaps it’s fitting that, this morning, his likeness at Coit Tower was pulled down by a crane, loaded onto a flatbed, and hauled off to parts unknown.
Perhaps that warehouse can be claimed in the name of Spain.
The man who created this monument, Vittorio de Colbertaldo, was the official sculptor for Mussolini and a member of his ceremonial “Black Musketeer” bodyguard. So today’s action is doubly fitting: This is not the first time a major element of Colbertaldo’s life has been forcibly taken down and hauled through the streets in chains.
The removal of this sculpture, like Ernest Hemingway’s extremely versatile description of bankruptcy, came gradually, then suddenly. Years of complaints about venerating a man who was renowned, in his own time, for his cruelty, spiked in post-George Floyd America — and culminated a day before a planned protest in which the statue was ostensibly to be toppled, dragged to Pier 31, and tossed into the Bay.
Your humble narrator earlier this month half-jokingly tweeted that nobody knows what Columbus looked like, so this sculpture could simply be renamed after someone who actually deserves a public monument.
But, clearly, in the real world, this manner of legerdemain would not do. The sculpture needed to come down because honoring Christopher Columbus in 2020 is repugnant — but, also, because Pier 31 is a hell of a long way from Coit Tower, that statue is very heavy, and, on top of everything else, we don’t need anyone being squashed by a falling monument as took place in Virginia last week.
So, goodbye, Columbus.
All art in The City is under jurisdiction of the SF Arts Commission, which will decide what comes next.
The following statement is from Supervisor @AaronPeskin, who represents the area: pic.twitter.com/QDNcf8XpGN
— Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) June 18, 2020
The process of selecting what manner of public art should replace this monument promises to be heated — the Native American Italian woman that would satisfy all sides doesn’t seem to exist, and, unlike the city’s extant sculpture collection, there isn’t yet a rich patron underwriting it.
These promise to be bitter discussions, but there’s no reason they can’t be honest ones. This city has other, more pressing problems, but a city can do two — even three or maybe four — things at once.
And why stop here? The flatbed that motored Columbus off to purgatory may well have taken Columbus Avenue. Coit Tower did not hold a public monopoly on racist monuments, and the life stories of many of the men — and they are, invariably, men — memorialized in street names are often jarring discordant with the professed values of this city (or any 21st-century locale averse to keeping slaves or murdering people).
Christopher Columbus is the Aunt Jemima of public monuments or street names. The documentable racism many people grew inured to over the years simply couldn’t be explained away anymore.
But he’s not alone. And if the painful discussions we’re due really are to be honest, there need to be more of them.
Naming streets isn’t something this city used to take all that seriously, it seems.
In 1855, Charles Gough was tabbed to the committee in charge of naming the streets in the Western Addition.
Gough may have picked a few deserving winners. But he, ostentatiously, picked himself, too — that’s why, 165 years later, every San Franciscan can tell you that this milkman’s name rhymed with “cough.”
He also named a street for his sister, Octavia, and his buddy and fellow milkman, Leopold Steiner. Well, plus ça change. In present-day San Francisco we strive to show inclusivity and demographic openness and hold countless public meetings — and, in the end, the job still goes to the work buddy of the guy who’s on the deciding committee.
This city could do well to reassess the rationale behind memorializing people via street names (or not memorializing them; cities in other parts of the world actually list the birth and death years and professions on streets named for actual people. A similar practice is undertaken in The Presidio.).
Somehow, San Francisco has not yet named even an alleyway after Harvey Milk. But there is no shortage of streets named after men whose relevance in today’s world was simply owning lots of land and having lots of money in 19th-century California — Henry Newhall, Peter Donahue, and others.
More objectionable, however, are men tainted by slavery, colonialism, murder, or genocide. You may not know about that, but you’ve all but surely walked these streets. To wit:
- Gen. Frederick Funston, who commanded the Presidio in 1906, was lauded as “the man who saved San Francisco” for his actions following the Great Quake. Before that, however, he was a high-level commander in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war. Recalling his wartime days, he once quipped that he had “personally strung up 35 Filipinos without trial.” Also from that same stemwinder: “Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war,” and American citizens who petitioned Congress to end the bloodshed “should be dragged out of their homes and lynched.”
- Andrew Jackson deserves a degree of respect having attained the office of president of the United States. But, in these times, it’s worth noting that he famously flouted a Supreme Court decision safeguarding treaty-protected Indian land from being seized by the state for gold-mining. He also championed the Indian Removal Act and owned hundreds of slaves.
- Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese or Spanish (no one is quite certain) explorer who was the first European in California. He has a street named for him in this city and his name is ubiquitous in our state. But he was also a conquistador of the first order who slaughtered and enslaved the native peoples of the Americas. To boot, he was a vast slave-holder who was granted huge tracts of land in Guatemala by the King of Spain.
You can navigate from one end of this city to the other on streets named for the colonialists who — actively and passively — enslaved and killed off the state’s native inhabitants. The streets named for members of Juan Bautista De Anza‘s exploratory party alone include Acevedo, Arballo, Cambón, Font, Gonzalez, Grijalva, Higuera, Moraga, Pacheco, Pinto, Serrano, Tapia, Taraval, Vicente, Vidal, Yorba — and, of course, Anza.
And don’t forget the sculptures. You can still find monuments to Funston, anti-Asian mayor and Senator James D. Phelan (“Keep California White”), anti-Asian unionist Andrew Furuseth, and slave-holder and National Anthem scribe Francis Scott Key — who, as a District Attorney, attempted to have a man hanged on charges of merely possessing abolitionist literature.
“The problem is, these are all statues based on the choice of rich people who gave money to the city,” summed up a frustrated longtime city official. “It’s not like anybody thinks Phelan is worthy of a statue.” Rather, he continued, “Nobody is writing a check for Maya Angelou.”
Long before the flatbed rolled up to Coit Tower this morning, San Francisco was reconsidering the wisdom of some of its public art and place names.
The city in 2018 removed the “Early Days” sculpture, depicting a supine Native American at the feet of white men, from Civic Center Plaza (the space is now serving as a fenced-off COVID-19 homeless encampment). In that same year, the city moved to strip the name of former Rep. Julius Kahn, the driving force behind the 1902 extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, from a playground.
Also in 2018, Phelan Avenue, near City College, was renamed Frida Kahlo Way (the street, incidentally, was not named after the racist politician James Phelan but his father … James Phelan. Nobody seemed too conflicted about this.).
One year prior, the city removed Justin Herman’s name from Embarcadero Plaza, giving the former redevelopment boss the same treatment he gave so many African American families in the Fillmore.
Former Polish president Lech Walesa is the rare man who outlived his street. In 1986, the Solidarity leader thanked the San Francisco officials who named a City Hall-adjacent street after him (it was quite a party; Joan Baez was there). In 2014, after Walesa proved to be a vitriolic homophobe, the Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance to strip his name from the street in favor of Gay Games founder Dr. Tom Waddell.
That was poetic justice. And that could happen again — should happen again. And again and again.
It may only be symbolic, but it’s a start. We become inured to the meaning behind our monuments and place names, and now is a good time to question their value and relevance.
We should not forget our troubling past. Quite the opposite. But we shouldn’t name a street after it, either.
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I would like to see Columbus Ave’s named changed to Al Baccari Way (or use his full first name, Alessandro). Mr. Baccari was a true San Francisco treasure; a keeper of wharf and North Beach history, and a fine humanitarian. Regarding another man mentioned in this article, Andrew Furuseth, that was someone with a complicated history. He was chiefly responsible for bringing the plight of merchant seamen to the attention of Congress, and of helping Senator Robert LaFollette, Sr. pass the Seamen’s Act in 1915, known as the seamen’s Magna Carta.” Furuseth was then lionized as the “Abraham Lincoln of the Sea” and the “Emancipator of the Sailors.” That he made great achievements for merchant seamen through union activities is not in doubt, but he was a confirmed white supremacist, not allowing people of color into the union, and, in fact, when testifying before Congress for passage of the Seamen’s Act, had said that one of his goals in passage was the preservation off the white race. He was also a member of an Asian exclusion organization. One historians of maritime me labor history, Bruce nelson, wrote how he even went further in his views on race than what a majority of white people believed in that time. So, I would think that given his extreme views on race coupled which affected the Coast Seamen’s Union’s exclusionary policies, we need to take a second look at how we memorialize him, or not memorialize him. I don’t believe his name, or any name, should be erased from history, but the question is, what do we do about an honest and complete assessment of him (and other figures). A fine article, by the way. Thank you for writing it.
Sorry for my typo: “..preservation off the white race” should have read “preservation of….”
Joe,
Should we tear down the pyramids in Egypt because they were built by slaves?
Should we rename our capital because Washington owned slaves?
Should we stop supporting our troops because they slaughtered native americans?
Should we rename our country, because Americo Vespuccio, from whose name the term America is derived, in his will he left his five slaves to his wife?
Should the Eskenazi Hospital in Indiana be demolished because it is built on a land that was stolen 200 years ago from the native americans that lived there?
Dear sir or madam —
It’s just Jan. 4, but we’ll have to keep this comment front-of-mind when compiling the “Dumbest Comments of 2021” list.
Also, I’m not related to the Eskenazis of Eskenazi Hospital fame, so that has nothing to do with me. The only thing that’ll affect me personally is the benefit to my Google ranking.
Yours,
JE
And you idiots wonder why folks don’t want to visit or move there any more!!
Your ridiculous virtue signaling is nauseating… and as a former resident, thank God I don’t live there anymore!!
Yes, thank God!
Yours,
JE
So, What exactly was racist about Columbus? You have to explain why do you think Columbus is a controversial figure to the indigenous population What has he done to the indigenous population except he managed to sail to the continent from Europe without sinking and dying? If he wouldn’t do it eventually someone else would get curious and sail. If no Europeans would do it native Americans eventually would develop the technology and sail to Europe. It was inevitable. Maybe following your logic, we also should remove all the Einstein images because he helps to develop a nuclear weapon that killed many people in Japan? It is absurd!
>You have to explain why do you think Columbus is a controversial figure to the indigenous population
I suggest you google what Columbus wrote in his diary, which was not covered in the children’s storybooks you grew up with.
Junipero Serra should be prominently featured on this list, especially because the atrocities and genocide that he committed are specific to California’s Indigenous peoples. He is the founder of the entire California mission system, which forcibly relocated and enslaved tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples, decimating the population of Indigenous coastal communities by up to 90% and destroying so much of their languages, knowledges, cultural and spiritual practices. They worked these people to death because they didn’t care about their lives, the missionaries just wanted to “save their souls”. All of this equates GENOCIDE. He isn’t part of a “long list” of racist pieces of shit, he should be at the top of every list in California because of the genocide he committed here.
It would be nice to see this statue in a Private Museum in North Beach emphasizing Italian/American Heritage. You cannot deny the Historical significance of Christopher Columbus.
This Jacque Brel/Rod McKuen song sums up what I’ve always felt about statues and the naming of public places: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnVIahxRWOA
As an Italian American, I’m distressed when I hear Columbus vilified.
When he and his crews set out from Europe nearly 530 years ago, he had no idea that another land existed between the European/ African west coastlines and the eastern shores of the Asian continent. He should not be held responsible for the greed and atrocities of those that followed him later on.
He was only looking for another way to the markets of Asia that did not mean crossing the vast tracks of land through the Middle East and the Southern Asian subcontinent.
Anyone of Italian heritage who grew up in the post-war Bay Area knows what it’s like to be called “dago” and “wop”, and likely endured a continuous stream of cruel jokes as they grew. After years of being associated with Don Corleone, they were then conflated with Tony Soprano. I challenge you to find a prominent Italian in popular American culture that is not mafia.
The BOS, and especially Malia Cohen, exhibited extraordinary callousness when changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Citizens Day and no other. Great, change the name, but show some sensitivity. You would think that Italian-Americans didn’t even exist. Fortunately, within a few weeks, Aaron Peskin stepped in, and now we have Italian Heritage Day.
When Columbus Avenue gets a well-deserved new name, clearly it must respect the contributions that Italian immigrants made to our city, especially North Beach. To walk that street is to see beauty and charm left behind by generations of Italians, many of whom first came here to escape the tyranny of Mussolini’s fascism. North Beach is a gift both to our quality of life and our economy.
There are many possibilities, such as Galileo, Marconi, DaVinci. Or, how about: “Assisi Avenue”, to honor the home of San Francisco’s namesake and our sister city in Italy.
Those are good choices. There is also DImaggio, who was from SF.
Columbus Avenue should be renamed Sacco and Vanzetti Boulevard.
And seriously, the previouos expansion of the ever expanding circles of whiteness occurred after WWII, when European “Ethnics,” Italians, Irish, Jews, etc. were incorporated into the WASP fold as white people to keep the numbers up.
At the time, there were no such things as microaggressions. The rule was “Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones.”
Italy was the opponent of the US during the fascist period. The US had to bomb Italy to contribute to ending fascism. In that regard, Italian patriotic statuary can be compared to Confederate monuments.
Contrast this to cop murder of Black people under color of authority with impunity to enforce apartheid or the theft of lands held in common by indigenous people and their subsequent containment, disposession and genocide.
How old are you? You sound incoherent. why does it matter what Italy was doing in WWII in regard to Columbus? Columbus was not a racist, he was able to sail from Europe to America, that’s it. He did not kill anyone.
oh his expedition did plenty of violence until the natives
Wait you’re kidding right?
Reminder: WASP stands for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Cable cars are racist! Take’m ALL OUT!!!
The “man who saved San Francisco”? Lieutenant Frederick Freeman, United States Navy. (In the words of James Thurber: “You could look it up”.)
I hope that during these discussions and calls for “ideas” the Ohlone people will be consulted first. Reparations to that community are long overdue. We are on unceded Ohlone territory.
Thanks.
This is great news! At this rate we’ll be demonetizing land, holding it in common, and paying reparations for five centuries of wholesale dispossession, containment and genocide of indigenous people by August.
Glad to see the statue go. The fight about “Columbus Day” was really an embarrassing one, and I definitely didn’t think this was going to follow anytime soon. We can all agree that there’s a lot more to celebrate about Italian American heritage and culture than him. It’s not like he was Italian American, heh.
I’m surprised that Junipero Serra is absent from the list of others. With both a road and statues named after him, I’d be thrilled to see them go. His legacy is death, enslavement and the destruction of indigenous people and culture — a stated goal. The only so-called defense of him is based in religion, which many disagree with the merits of, and we shouldn’t be endorsing regardless.
Tarniv —
That’s a legit point and the list of street names/sculptures to reconsider is long. I’d be glad if this comments section can serve as a discussion center and repository of suggestions.
I highly recommend this website with regard to street names: https://noahveltman.com
JE