J. Marion Sims Statue Headed To Brooklyn Tuesday

NEW YORK CITY HALL — The Parks Department will move a monument of J. Marion Sims from East Harlem to Brooklyn on Tuesday, a day after a city panel cemented the controversial statue's fate.

The Parks Department plans to remove the bronze figure of Sims — an early gynecologist who experimented on enslaved black women — from its pedastal at Central Park and East 103rd Street and place it at Green-Wood Cemetery in Windsor Terrace, where Sims is buried.

The city Public Design Commission unanimously approved the plan Monday after a special commission appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio recommended the move in January. De Blasio empaneled the commission to determine what to do with the city's monuments to now-reviled historical figures such as Sims and Christopher Columbus.

"The societal circumstances (under) which Sims conducted his scientific breakthroughs represent values that are inappropriately celebrated in this work of public art," Jonathan Kuhn, the Parks Department’s director for art and antiquties, told the Public Design Commission in a Monday afternoon presentation.

The statue was first erected at Bryant Park in 1894 and moved to its current location on a four-and-a-half-foot pedastal across from the New York Academy of Medicine in 1934.

At Green-Wood, it will stand on a much smaller base and will be accompanied by informational signs that will give "context as to who he was and the history of the sculpture itself," Kuhn said. Once it's removed, the statue will get some minor repairs before it's delivered to Green-Wood Tuesday afternoon, a Parks Department spokesman said.

Efforts to remove the statue go back about a decade, but it drew renewed attention last year after violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a monument to Confederate commander Robert E. Lee.

East Harlem's local community board, City Council members, the Academy of Medicine and others supported the Sims statue's relocation, said Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, who co-chaired de Blasio's monuments commission. The city will commission a new artwork for the Central Park location, Finkelpearl said.

But some activists say the Sims statue should be destroyed altogether. Putting informational plaques next to it is "insulting and belittling" to the women whom Sims tortured with his medical experiments, said Amrit Trewn, the organizing chair of the Black Youth Project 100, an activist group.

"Complete the job and bury him," City Councilwoman Inez Barron (D-Brooklyn) said.

Finkelpearl, Barron and Trewn were among eight people who testified in favor of getting rid of the statue at Monday's hearing, held inside a City Hall conference room that felt much smaller than the controversy at hand.

Moving the monument, supporters argued, marks an important first step toward putting Sims, a painful figure for women of color, in his rightful place and honoring the women who suffered in his experiments.

Signe Nielsen, the Public Design Commission's president, broke into tears before putting the removal plans up for a vote. "I'm not a woman of color, but I am deeply moved by what I heard today," she said.

The only person who wanted the statue to stay put was Michele Bogart, an art history professor at Stony Brook University. There's no good reason to move the figure, she said, which is a part of New York City's history.

"The narratives about Sims, the surgeon, upon which the mayor's task force drew to pass down its sentence are skewed by present-ist perspectives on the past," Bogart said as four activists filmed her on their cellphones.

"Bye, Felicia," one of them said when Bogart finished.

(Lead image: The Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims will be moved to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Tuesday. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)