Columbus Circle without Columbus? New York's statue debate hits Italian-Americans hard
When Joseph Guagliardo was a street kid growing up in Red Hook in Brooklyn, the statue of Christopher Columbus at the southwest corner of Central Park in Manhattan made him swell with pride.
His grandmother, Giavanna, who arrived from Sicily near the turn of the century and, like many immigrants, Anglicized her name and went by Jenny, would take him on the subway to see the 76-foot-high memorial at the center of Columbus Circle. She’d tell him the story of how Italian immigrants, most with barely enough money to get by, scraped together enough to donate the statue to the city – a tradition he now continues with his twin teenage daughters, Isabella and Emma.
“My grandmother had three pictures hanging on a great big wall her entire life: the pope, Jesus, and Columbus,” says Mr. Guagliardo, who heads The National Council of Columbia Associations, a Brooklyn-based coalition of Italian-American civic groups from around the United States that continue to see the explorer as an icon of American resilience.
But the famous memorial, donated to the city by immigrants in
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