RTD tells the back story of the Columbus statue on Boulevard
The statue was originally intended for Monument Avenue in the 1920s, but a backlash ensued.
From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
Standing at the end Boulevard, next to the tennis courts at Byrd Park, is the first statue of Christopher Columbus erected in the South. In the early 1920s, Richmond’s Italian-American community – about 1,000 strong – wanted to gift a statue of their kinsman to their adopted home. The residents hoped city officials would add a Columbus statue to Monument Avenue, but their request was quickly rejected by a city committee. It claimed that Columbus was not only foreign but Catholic – and thus could not possibly stand among some of the Confederacy’s most revered figures.
My how times have changed since the ’20s. A Catholic and a non Confederate icon? Oh the horror!
Read the rest of the interesting story from the RTD here.
Photo: Richmond on the James
-
Recommend this
on Facebook -
Report an error
-
Subscribe to our
Weekly Digest
Trevor Dickerson
Trevor Dickerson loves all things Richmond and manages RVANews’ West of the Boulevard and West End community sites.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
that intersection could really use that statue being moved more to the center in a more modern / larger roundabout.
actually, scratch that. get rid of columbus, and build a traffic circle with a statue to Edo Vasaio