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Fountain Near the Kew Gardens Courthouse, Sept. 2006

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

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