Henry Ward Beecher monument restoration unveiled in Columbus Park

‘Adopt-a-Monument’ Program Brings NYC Parks Dept. & NYC Public Design Commission to Brooklyn Icon

June 29, 2017 By Andy Katz Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Henry Ward Beecher Debby Applegate speaks with the uncovered monument in the background. Eagle photos by Andy Katz

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“’It is not well for a man to pray cream and live as skim milk’,” Dr. John Scibilia said, quoting the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Scibilia, executive director of the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, stood at the lectern set in the center of Columbus Park, just a few feet beyond bustling Johnson Street on Thursday, June 22. Before him were arrayed rows of people seated in collapsible chairs, and to one side stood members of an adult choir in white choral robes.

Behind Scibilia a golden cloth-covered edifice rose 15 feet into the air.

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was Plymouth Church of the the Pilgrims’ first minister and one of the most famous, renowned and controversial men of the 19th century. A staunch proponent of union and opponent of slavery, Beecher held mock slave auctions to raise the funds to buy freedom for individuals in bondage. Sharpes rifles, purchased by Beecher for use by abolitionist forces in Bleeding Kansas, became known as “Beecher Bibles.” Beecher expressed many other progressive ideals, favoring suffrage for women and accepting evolution as consistent with Christian teachings.

Beecher’s speaking tour of Europe, undertaken at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, was widely credited with preventing European nations from recognizing the Confederacy.

His funeral in 1887 drew thousands of mourners who lined the streets leading to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

It should come as no surprise that statues and memorials to Beecher abound in Brooklyn. The best known — and the reason for the day’s gathering — is John Quincy Adams Ward and Richard Morris Hunt’s Henry Ward Beecher Monument in Columbus Park. Dedicated in 1891, the monument is one of Brooklyn’s best-known tributes to the man whose sermons drew thousands of listeners from all over the northeast and who helped to galvanize public opinion against slavery.

“We must become what this statue represents,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. “This statue is renewed as we are renewed!”

The statue’s restoration was undertaken by Brooklyn-based Wilson Conservation, under the oversight of the NYC Parks Department, the Conservation Advisory Group of the NYC Public Design Commission, and, of course, the Adopt-a-Monument program of the Municipal Art Society of New York City (MASNYC) with funds supplied by a grant from the Paul and Klara Porzelt Foundation, which has also funded the restoration of other public works such as the Farragut monument in Madison Square Park and Worth monument in City Hall Park.

“We stand here at the center of public life in Brooklyn,” NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver told the audience prior to the unveiling. “Occasions such as this help us to reinvigorate what our heroes stood for.”

At that point knots were loosened, lines released and the golden cloth slid languidly away from the restored statue. Once more, Reverend Beecher stood overlooking Cadman Plaza, his gaze directed at the Borough Hall of his beloved adopted home.

“For the first time in generations, people will see the statue as John Quincy Adams Ward and Richard Hunt intended,” MASNYC President Elizabeth Goldstein declared.

After a rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!” by the Plymouth Church Choir, guests were invited to a reception at Plymouth Church itself.

The final speaker of the day, Beecher biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Debby Applegate, spoke about the minister’s life: “He was a complicated man,” she recounted, “a man of great passion and contradictions.” In closing she cited another famous Brooklyn son — Walt Whitman: “‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’”