From today's New York Times By DAVID W. DUNLAP
A Statue of Muhammad, Taken Down Years Ago
It would have given great offense, had anyone known it was there.
For the first half of the 20th century, an eight-foot-tall marble statue of the Prophet Muhammad overlooked Madison Square Park from the rooftop of the Appellate Division Courthouse at Madison Avenue and 25th Street.
Sixty years ago, the statue was quietly removed, in an episode that now looks, in light of recent events in Paris, like the model of tact, restraint and diplomacy.
What had spared the sensibilities of Muslim passers-by from 1902 to 1955 was that “Muhammad,” by the Mexican sculptor Charles Albert Lopez, was among nine other lawgivers, including Con***ius and Moses.
After New York’s polluted air had finished with the sugary stone, trying to figure out who was whom from street level, three very tall stories below the courthouse rooftop, would have been a fool’s game.
If any attribute might have identified Mr. Lopez’s figure as Middle Eastern, it would have been its scimitar. But the distinctive curving blade had fallen off at some point.
“They probably didn’t know he was there,” George T. Campbell, the chief clerk of the Appellate Division, First Department, said in 1955, when the statue was finally removed out of deference to Muslims, to whom depictions of the prophet are an affront.
(For the same reason, The New York Times has chosen not to publish photographs of the statue with this article.)
It does not seem likely that the designers of the courthouse intended offense to Muslims or anyone else. The architect, James Brown Lord, worked closely with a group of sculptors, including Mr. Lopez, to ornament the facade with figures that would instruct and inspire viewers.
“These artists were rendering the image of the prophet in a spirit of respect,” said Michele H. Bogart, a professor of art history at Stony Brook University and the author of “Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930.” “They were interested in Islam’s contribution, as one of the great world religions, to American law and civilization of the early 20th century.”
Many American civic buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are rich in allegorical or representational artworks whose meanings are largely lost on contemporary viewers. They may have been an equal mystery back in the day.
It was not until 1953, when the Appellate Division announced that long-needed repairs were to be made at the crumbling courthouse, that the identity of one of the statues as a representation of Muhammad was widely recalled.
Had the New York City Department of Public Works prevailed at the time, all 10 statues would have been removed from the courthouse, since they were in a state of dangerous disrepair. The clerk, Mr. Campbell, fought hard to repair, clean and keep them.
Public discussion of the project, however, had alerted the embassies of Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan to the existence of “Muhammad.” They asked the State Department to intervene with the city’s public works commissioner.
Many Muslims also wrote directly to the First Department, Mr. Campbell said, asking the court to get rid of the statue. “Our seven justices recommended granting the request,” he said in 1955.
To compensate for the absence of a figure at the commanding southwest corner of the building, seven statues were shifted one pedestal westward, leaving “Zoroaster” by Edward C. Potter in the place of “Muhammad.” The easternmost pedestal, once occupied by Henry K. Bush-Brown’s “Justinian,” was left vacant.
Sometime in 1954 or 1955, “Muhammad,” which weighed more than 1,000 pounds, was lowered to the street, wrapped in excelsior and spirited off to a storehouse in Newark. It had not yet been destroyed when The Times reported the episode on April 9, 1955.
An article in The Times on Feb. 12, 2006, “Images of Muhammad, Gone for Good,” made a tantalizing reference to the statue’s having last been seen in 1983, “lying on its side in a stand of tall grass somewhere in New Jersey.”
If the statue is still out there, however, now would not seem to be the moment to uncover it.
