Fountain Near the Kew Gardens Courthouse, Sept. 2006

At Union Turnpike and Queens Blvd. you will also find "Fat Boy," or, more properly, Civic Virtue. It's probably the most over-the-top classically-themed public sculpture in New York City; only the Bailey Fountain, in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, comes close in ebullience. A massive statue depicting a nude muscular youth (depicting virtue) with a club slung over his right shoulder; at his feet writhe two nude mermaids (depicting vice). When Frederick MacMonnies created it from a single block of marble in 1919 and it was placed in Manhattan’s City Hall Park, it engendered no end of a hue and cry from offended feminists, prudes, and heavy hitters such as Charles Norton, President of Harvard University. Such a sensual depiction would not stand! Not in virtuous Manhattan. Eventually, in 1941, it was packed up, mermaids and all, and shipped to the Queens’ Borough Hall Plaza, where, presumably, right-thinking people wouldn’t see it.

Text from: www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET SCENES/queensblvd2/qblvd2.html