A few years ago, a young Georgian presented a point to ponder when she asked from the back of the bus, "Why do people always gots to be dyin' before the good stuff?" At first, I had no idea what in the world she was going on about, but then I thought back over some of my commentary. There is a significant number of New Yorkers who have died before seeing their contributions to the city completed or recognized. This week we're featuring ten of them, two a day.
THE MONUMENTS
1--The most enduring work by Emma Lazarus, a prolific writer on the subjects of Judaism and America, is a sonnet written to raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. (The French sent over the statue without a stand and asked us to take care of that. The French also like showing up at parties with flowers and forcing the hostess to scrounge around for a vase.) The New Colossus, concludes with the lines:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
By putting these words in Liberty's mouth, Lazarus framed the sculpture as a beacon for immigrants and a symbol of the American promise, associations that were more hers than they were the sculptor's. Though her poem is now engraved on a plaque located inside the very pedestal she helped to finance, Emma Lazarus never got a chance to see the Statue of Liberty. Suffering from cancer, perhaps Hodgkin's Disease, Lazarus left for Europe in 1885, a year before the statue was assembled. When she returned in 1887, she was too sick to come to the deck, and she died on the Upper West Side two months later.
2--Ulysses S. Grant led the Union forces to victory in the Civil War and served two terms as president. Then the tides turned. Unable to secure a third nomination, he moved to New York and trusted almost all of his assets to a Barry Madoff type character named Ferdinand Ward who bankrupted his company, ruining the former president as well as other investors recruited by Grant. Around this time, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer. It seemed an ignominious end to a remarkable career, but he was soon approached by none other than Mark Twain who offered to publish his memoirs. Grant, ill and destitute, set to work and finished his book a few days before his death.
The memoirs would go on to sell 300,000 copies and provide his family with almost half a million dollars. The success of what many still consider the best presidential memoirs ever written played a part in raising the donations to build Grant's Tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America.
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