Grand Army Plaza

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Grand Army Plaza forms the entranceway into the beautiful Prospect Park. The area surrounding the park was originally part of a vast planned street way of equivalence to Avenue de la Grande Armee in Paris.

The centerpiece of this space is the Arch, designed by John H. Duncan and incorporated into the planning of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead, the designers of Prospect Park and Central Park.

The Arch is a Civil War memorial depicting Union Soldiers protected by Roman-esque gods.  On the interior of the arch are Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant on horseback.

Arch at night:

Arch during day:

Accessibility is definitely an issue with this piece. In the years since Olmstead and Vaux worked on the site, poor urban planning took over. The arch is circled with four lanes of traffic and limited crosswalks, making an up-close encounter something of a death-defying experience.

Here’s some more detailed shots of the arch:

This last image is of the top piece on the arch, The Quadriga from a public account on flickr, since I couldn’t climb up myself.

Interestingly enough, when I first saw the arch two years ago, I assumed that the female figure in the chariot was Minerva-Athena, the Greco-Roman goddess of war and wisdom. However, the wikipedia article on I read on the Arch called her Columbia. I had never heard the name in reference to a personage, so I did a Boolean search on Google and found a VERY interesting blog article:

“In the late 18th and early 19th century, a stream of images crystallized the goddess form into ‘Columbia.’ The ideas that animated her can best be seen by her attributes, that is the objects or symbols that are displayed with her. She is most often shown with an eagle, broken chains and pottery, a cornucopia, images of George Washington, a laurel wreath, a liberty pole and cap, a liberty tree, an olive branch, a rattlesnake, a shield and a stone tablet. The statue of Columbia behind the speaker’s chair in the house of representatives is a fine example. In this one we see the Eagle, and on the other side a snake coiled around a Greek column.

Columbia is not a Greek or Roman goddess, although she borrowed a few attributes when she needed them, but a consciously created god-form archetype inserted into the mass consciousness of the country at its founding.”

Great stuff! So America has her own goddess! I never knew! The imagery evoked, though, of a patron protector fierce in battle, triumphant and victorious is quite beautiful. Also the image of this goddess watching over American soldiers. Beautiful. Too bad today’s polemic doesn’t include this kind of female goddess figure. Even if it could be utilized to perpetuate conflict, at least it’s an interesting symbol.