A memorial to Italian immigrant families wasn’t the only idea considered for replacing the Christopher Columbus statue that was thrown into Baltimore’s harbor on July 4, 2020. According to the Italian American group that raised more than $200,000 for a new memorial on the pedestal where the Columbus statue had been, ideas included monuments to Amerigo Vespucci, Mother Cabrini and the D’Alesandro family of Little Italy. But in the end, the members of Italian American Organizations United decided to erect the Anonymous Italian American Family Memorial on the public plaza where the Columbus statue was — at South President Street and Eastern Avenue, just west of Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood. “This memorial honors the courage, sacrifice and dreams of generations of Italian immigrants who came to America seeking opportunity – and built the Little Italy we know today,” reads a description prepared by the organizers. “Their journey became our story.” More than 60 people gathered on the former Columbus plaza just before noon on Wednesday to hear about the memorial and when it will appear. The gathering took place almost exactly six years after a mob lassoed the Columbus statue and threw it into Baltimore’s harbor shortly before the Fourth of July fireworks show at the Inner Harbor. John Pica, the president of Italian American Organizations United, told the gathering that his group has raised more than $200,000 to create a new memorial to go on top of the pedestal where the Columbus statue stood from 1984 until it was toppled in 2020, including $140,000 from the state of Maryland. The original statue was dedicated on Oct. 8, 1984, in a ceremony led by former President Ronald Reagan and then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer. It was vandalized as part of a wave of protests around the country following the death of George Floyd, a Minneapolis resident who died after a police officer knelt on his neck and back for more than nine minutes. No one was ever arrested in the Baltimore incident. The replacement memorial will depict an Italian immigrant husband alongside his wife holding their infant child. Measuring seven feet tall, three feet wide and four feet deep, it will be made of Italian Carrara marble, shipped from Italy and carved by sculptor Sebastian Martorana of Atlantic Custom Carving LLC in Baltimore. The figures will face Little Italy. Pica said his group is aiming for the memorial to be installed by the fall of 2027. The Italian Americans previously had decided not to put another Columbus statue on the pedestal, given what happened to the first one. The group commissioned a replica by Eastern Shore artist Will Hemsley and it has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D. C. where it’s “under the protection of the Secret Service,” Pica said. Pica and others said on Wednesday that their group considered a variety of ideas for a new memorial, including tributes to Vespucci (1454 to 1512), an Italian explorer and navigator who participated in voyages to the “New World” between 1499 and 1502 and is considered by many the first European to recognize the Americas as a separate continent, and Mother Cabrini (Frances Xavier Cabrini, 1850 to 1917), a prominent Italian-American religious sister in the Catholic Church and the first American to be recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint. Pica said members wondered whether anyone would criticize a statue of Vespucci and “wanted to …more or less avoid an explorer.” While Mother Cabrini was “a close second,” he said, the idea of paying tribute to an Italian immigrant family had the most support. “It demonstrates the determination and resiliency of the Italian American community while at the same time it preserves legacy that younger Italian Americans and others can admire,” Pica said.   Although having two adult figures and a baby rather than one figure would potentially take up more space on top of the existing pedestal, Martorana said he was confident he could make the adult figures fit given the pedestal’s dimensions. In addition to the stone memorial, three plaques will be placed on the fence around the pedestal. They will recognize the donors and public officials who have made the memorial possible, the ethnic groups that lived in the area before the arrival of Italian immigrants, including Jewish and African American residents and members of two Native American tribes, and members of the D’Alesandro family of Little Italy, including former Baltimore mayors Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. and Thomas D”Alesandro III, and Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives and daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. Other details discussed on Wednesday: Funding: Funds have been raised from 30 individual donors and more have made pledges. The ‘baseline’ donation was $2,000. Pica thanked Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson for helping the group secure $140,000 from the Maryland General Assembly as “seed money” to get its fundraising effort started. Italian Carrara marble: The marble is coming from the Cannalina Quarry in Italy’s Carrara basin. It’s being shipped to Baltimore in one piece, weighing 10 tons. When the stone is chipped away, the artist said, the memorial will weigh between two and three tons. The Columbus statue, by contrast, was created in Italy by sculptor Mauro Bigarani and shipped to Baltimore. Design review: The memorial will be owned by the Italian American Organizations United, which also owns the pedestal. It will be located on land owned by the City of Baltimore. Pica said the memorial has been approved by Reginald Moore, the Director of Baltimore’s Department of Recreation and Parks. Pica said he has no plans to take it to the city’s Public Art Commission, which by law is authorized to review and approve plans for any sculpture, monuments, memorials or statuary planned for city property. “We’re not going to them. We don’t need them,” he said. Major commission: Martorana has had work on view at the Walters Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as in numerous private buildings and collections, including the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He is one of two sculptors, along with David Hess, who designed a memorial honoring John Waters’ muse, Divine. It would have gone on the side of a house in Mount Vernon near where Divine had a key scene in “Pink Flamingos,” the scene where he eats dog droppings. The Divine memorial was approved by Baltimore’s Public Art Commission under then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, but it never materialized. One holdup was that questions were raised about who would clean up any trash that might be left behind if fans made the Divine memorial a pilgrimage spot. Another sticking point was that Waters didn’t support it because he didn’t think Divine, who died in 1988, would have wanted to be remembered for that scene in his movie. Martorana said the Italian immigrant memorial is one of his largest commissions to date. He’s known for sculpting everyday items in marble, such as a bath towel hanging on a towel rack. His everyday item in this sculpture is a 1900s-vintage suitcase, not today’s rolling luggage with spinner wheels, made out of marble and positioned on the ground next to the adult male. Rendering depicts the planned Anonymous Italian American Family Memorial. Photo credit: Ed Gunts. Martorana said he plans to have models pose for the figures, but he hasn’t selected them yet. He said the clothes on the figures will be representative of what immigrants would have worn between 1880 and 1920. Pica jokingly volunteered to model for the male figure. Martorana said he considers it an honor to be selected as the sculptor. “I’m excited to start on this,” he said. “I’m the product of immigrants like, I’m going to guess…everyone standing here.” Some immigrants “rolled the dice” and “made a long trip to do work that they didn’t want to do,” he said. Generations later, “I get to do work that I want to do, every day.” He said it’s fitting that the marble is coming from Italy because that means the stone is “an immigrant too.” Security concerns: Questions were raised about the security of the replacement memorial and what precautions the group may be taking to prevent a repeat of what happened before. The organizers said the Columbus statue wasn’t mounted securely on the pedestal and that made it easy to take down. They said the immigrant memorial will be attached to the pedestal with steel rods. Pica said there will be surveillance cameras operating 24 hours a day and a security fence around the pedestal, which wasn’t present in 2020. One big difference between 2020 and 2026, Pica said, is that the city has a different police chief and a different state’s attorney than it did in 2020. “If you try to deface and damage that statue, no matter how tall you are or how short you are, you will pay and be prosecuted,” he said. When the Columbus statue was torn down in 2020, he said, “about 20 police officers from the Baltimore City police department watched,” he said. “We have a different police commissioner now. I don’t think Commissioner [Richard] Worley will tolerate that.” He also chided the protestors who took down the Columbus statue. “I hope those kids that did this six years ago have had a chance to mature and appreciate how stupid and ignorant they were,” he said. What happened to pieces of the Columbus statue that were fished out of the harbor: Members of the Italian American group salvaged as many fragments as they could, including parts of the head and torso, but it wasn’t enough to reassemble Bigarani’s statue. The salvaged pieces are in storage on the Eastern Shore. Board member Bill Martin said one idea is to display them with the replica statue or perhaps exhibit them in a museum to tell the story of the 1984 statue and what happened in 2020. Another idea, Martin said, is to sell fragments of the statue as a way of raising funds for the replacement memorial or other projects, the way the Getty Center in Los Angeles sold souvenir blocks of limestone as paperweights to raise money. For now, he said, the fragments will remain locked in storage until the group decides what to do. ...read more read less