J. Marion Sims Statue To Be Moved From Central Park

CENTRAL PARK, NY — A Central Park monument that honors a doctor who experimented on black slave women without their consent or anesthesia will be relocated following recommendations from the mayor's Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, the city announced Friday.

The statue of J. Marion Sims — hailed by some as the "father of modern gynecology" — currently stands in Central Park on Fifth Avenue and East 103rd Street. Following recommendations of the mayor's commission, the statue will be relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

In addition to moving the statue from the East Harlem stretch of Central Park, the city will add informational plaques to its pedestal to document the historical context of the legacy of medical experimentation on black women. The city will also commission new artwork that reflects these issues and partner with a community organization to host dialogues on the history of medical experimentation.

The J. Marion Sims statue is the only monument studied by the mayor's commission that will be moved to a new location. A coalition of neighborhood activists and city officials from multiple boroughs calling for the removal of the statue formed after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of the monuments commission.

"While some people praise Dr. Sims for his medical advances, there's nothing to be proud of here as non-anesthetized, enslaved black women were tortured and abused by his experiments," new East Harlem City Councilwoman Diana Ayala said in October. "J. Marion Sims is a painful symbol of our nation's troubling relationship with race and with our country's insufficient efforts to right the wrongs of longstanding injustices."

The placement of the statue in East Harlem, a majority black and Latino community, is especially offensive to neighborhood residents, coalition members said Thursday.

The statue was vandalized in August when somebody spray-painted the word "racist" on its back and splashed red paint on the statue's head, face and neck.

The bronze and granite monument to Sims — who conducted 30 experimental operations without anesthesia on a 17-year-old slave named Anarcha — has stood on Fifth Avenue since 1934 as a gift from the Academy of Medicine, according to the Central Park Conservancy.

The inscription describes Sims as a "surgeon & philanthropist" who founded New York State's Woman's Hospital.

The Sims statue is one of four controversial statues — including a monument to a Nazi sympathizer — whose history sparked outrage in 2017 and that the Mayor's office promised on Friday to either move or provide more "historical context."

"Reckoning with our collective histories is a complicated undertaking with no easy solution," de Blasio said in a statement. "Our approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to – instead of removing entirely – the representations of these histories."

Photo by Patch