Statues and Memorials
Near the Cascades waterfall on the western edge of the park is an 1876 statue of Edward Bates, who was US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. It was the first statue installed in the park. Originally located at the southeast entrance to the park, it was moved during the 1950s during construction of Interstate 64. Medallions at the base of the statue depict James Eads, Hamilton R. Gamble, Charles Gibson, and Henry S. Geyer.
The second-oldest statue in the park is the statue of Frank Blair, a U.S. Army general and U.S. senator from Missouri. The statue, located at Kingshighway and Lindell boulevards, was donated by the Blair Monument Association in May 1885. Also at the corner is the modernist Jewish Tercentenary Monument, sculpted by Kurt Perisee in 1956. Commemorating the 300th anniversary of the first Jewish settlement in New Amsterdam, the main figures represent the Four Freedoms. In 1989, the monument underwent a $275,000 restoration funded by Howard Baer, an organizer of the Zoo-Museum District that funds regional museums.
The Apotheosis of St. Louis, located at the north entrance of the Saint Louis Art Museum, is a bronze sculpture of an armored and mounted King Louis IX of France, preparing for battle. In the early 2000s, the statue was restored; the more than $22,000 cost covered cleaning of the statue, refinishing of the patina, adding protective coating, and restoring the granite pedestal. The original plaster model by the sculptor Charles Niehaus was displayed at the entrance to the 1904 World's Fair, and the finished bronze was given to the city in 1906 by the organizers of the fair. Two statues flank the museum entrance: Sculpture and Painting by Daniel Chester French and Louis Saint-Gaudens, respectively.
In 1913, the St. Louis Turnverein donated funds for the construction of a monument to Friedrich Jahn, the founder of the Turnverein and modern gymnastics. Designed by Robert Cauer, the statue is located on the former site of the German Pavilion at the 1904 World's Fair. The next year, in 1914, the Ladies Confederate Monument Association donated a statue commemorating the Confederate States of America on the north side of the park, near the Dwight Davis Tennis Center. Sculpted by George Julian Zolnay, it depicts an allegorical figure of an angel and a Southern family sending its only male child to fight in the American Civil War.
The National Federation of Musicians donated funds for the Musicians Memorial and Fountain to honor Owen Miller and Otto Ostendorf, members of the federation. The memorial, built in 1925, was designed by Victor Holm. Two years after the creation of the Musicians Memorial, the Steinberg family donated Joie de Vivre, a work by Jacques Lipchitz depicting the joy of life, which is located adjacent to the Steinberg Skating Rink.
Near the Jewel Box is the Colonial Daughter Fountain, donated by the Missouri Society of Colonial Daughters in 1947. Also on the grounds of the Jewel Box is a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, sculpted by Carl Mose and donated by the wife of Harry Turner, a St. Louis publisher.
Read more about this topic: Forest Park (St. Louis)
Famous quotes containing the words statues and, statues and/or memorials:
“But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?”
—James Elroy Flecker (1884–1919)
“America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they’d be smaller then these.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“Let these memorials of built stone music’s
enduring instrument, of many centuries of
patient cultivation of the earth, of English
verse ...”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)