The Juan Pablo Duarte Statue - Duarte Square

 

In 1945, Sixth Avenue, at the prompting of Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, was renamed the "Avenue of the Americas" to honor Pan-American ideals.  The renaming ceremony in October that year included a parade of 4,000 World War II veterans.  Colorful medallions--300 of them--depicting the coats of arms of Latin American countries were hung from the avenue's lampposts.

Within a few years two statues of Latin American  heroes--liberator Simon Bolivar and Argentine General José de San Martin--were moved to the entrance of Central Park at the head of the Avenue of the Americas.  Eventually, seven monuments to Latin American figures would line the route.  

At the time of the renaming, the construction of the Holland Tunnel, completed in 1927, had left the trapezoidal plot at Canal Street, Sullivan Street, Grand Street and the Avenue of the Americas little more than a barren parking lot.  A triangular portion along Sixth Avenue was named Juan Pablo Duarte Square in 1945.

The plot as it appeared in 1932.  The western section, to the left, is owned by Trinity Church.  The coming statue would be placed approximately where the wooden shack stands.  from the collection of the New York Public Library.

The square honored Juan Pablo Duarte, who attempted to liberate the Spanish speaking inhabitants on the eastern portion of Hispaniola Island from Haitian rule in 1843.  He failed, but when a subsequent revolution won independence in 1844, he was installed as the president of the new republic of the Dominican Republic.  Unfortunately he would later be ousted by a military dictator and die in exile; however, his ideals of democracy and self-government within Pan-American culture continued to be celebrated.

The naming of the plot had little meaning without a monument to draw attention to it and the hero.  Nevertheless, it would be more than three decades before the Club Juan Pablo Duarte, Inc. prompted a movement to erect a statue.  The Dominican Republic commissioned Italian artist Nicola Arrighini to sculpt a larger-than-life bronze statue of Duarte as a gift to the City of New York.

The statue was installed on the anniversary of Duarte's birthday, January 26, 1978.  There was no ceremony and no formal dedication, and there was no mention of the installment in any newspapers.  

Arrighini depicts the hero in a dignified pose, his left hand resting on a cane and his right hand holding a scroll.  The front of the pedestal identifies Duarte as "Founder Of The Dominican Republic."  The following year, the triangle around the statue was designated a park.  On March 27, 1979, The Villager succinctly reported that Community Board 2 "passed without objection to the remapping of Duarte Square, a small portion of 6th Avenue between Canal and Grand Sts., as a public place." 

Decades after the fact, New York City's Dominican community was offended by the statue's being relegated to a spot where it could get little attention.  On May 5, 1987, Newsday reported, "The statue of Juan Pablo Duarte, the father of the Dominican Republic, stands in an obscure square in downtown Manhattan, far from monuments to other Latin American heroes at the top of the Avenue of the Americas and in Central Park.  Its location has long irritated Dominicans in New York."

The square did receive attention in November 2011, but it had nothing to do with the Dominican figure.  The western portion of the block--from Varick to Sullivan Street (the latter no longer open at this point) and from Canal to Grand Street--is owned by Trinity Church.  Since the Holland Tunnel project, it had been kept vacant and, often, fenced.  

On September 17, a movement called Occupy Wall Street began in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District.  Protestors took over the park and camped out in tents.  The decades-long vacant lot next to Duarte Square caught dissenters' attention.  A month after Occupy Wall Street began, on November 26 The New York Times reported, "The midday arrests at the Canal Street lot unfolded next to a triangular space known as Duarte Square, for the first president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte." Protestors created a hole in the fencing and "held a general-assembly-style discussion on whether to 'liberate another piece of property.'"

The incident was, perhaps, the Duarte statue's only brief time in the spotlight.  Nicola Arrighini's stately representation of Juan Pablo Duarte is greatly overlooked in the little park that few New Yorkers know exists.

photographs by the author