City Beautiful Blog
Blizzard, price gouging, and the death of a politician — Roscoe Conkling monument
At the southeast corner of Madison Square Park stands a statue marked by a laconic plaque: Roscoe Conkling. A towering figure in 19th-century politics, Roscoe Conkling owes this monument to a mighty nature calamity that led to his untimely demise.
March 12, , started as an ordinary spring day but ended as a major climate catastrophe. The whole East Coast was struck by a powerful snowstorm that went down in history as the Great Blizzard or the White Hurricane. One of the most severe in recorded history, it dumped 40 inches of snow; sustained winds of 45 mph created snowdrifts up to 50 feet in height!
On March 12, , Roscoe Conkling left his Wall Street office in order to get to his club located around Madison Square Park. As the storm was already raging, finding a horse-drawn cab became challenging. An entrepreneurial cab driver offered Conkling a ride at a &#;special&#; storm-inflated price&#; The politician indignantly refused to be taken for a ride &#; literally &#; and set out on a journey uptown on foot. Mountains of snow and ferocious winds brought the
| photo by D. C. McJonathan |
Roscoe Conkling was among the most recognized of New York's citizens in Born in Albany on October 30, , he grew up among lawyers and politicians. His father, Alfred Conkling, was both a federal judge and a U. S. Representative; and his mother, the former Eliza Cockburn, was cousin of Lord Chief-Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn. Noteworthy political figures who passed through the Conkling parlors included Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams.
Roscoe was, however, a rambunctious child and a frustration to his father, who called him a "utterly untutored" at the age of He was send off to boarding school at Mount Washington Collegiate Institute to receive disciplined instruction. It worked.
At the age of 17 Conkling chose to study law within a Utica firm rather than continue to college. His outstanding oratory skills and his strong views on human rights made him a recognized speaker. At only 18 years old he spoke passionately and eloquently about the starving victims of Ireland's Great Famine.
Conkling married Julia Catherine Seymour, and was admitted to the bar in He went on to be a distri
Roscoe Conkling Statue
The Senator Roscoe Conkling Monument honors the legacy of a man who was a well-known personality in the park and its outlying communities in the midth century. Visitors can find the monument at the park&#;s southeast entrance at 23rd Street near the Shake Shack.
Sculpted by John Quincy Adams Ward, this dynamic rendering of Conkling shows the eloquent politician delivering a speech before the United States Senate. First displayed in , this massive, 8-foot high, 1,pound statue was hoisted along with its granite pedestal and moved 20 feet to its current home during a park renovation in the summer of
While in the senate, Conkling was a champion of the 14th amendment and led New York&#;s Republican party. Conkling fell ill and eventually died after walking three miles from his law office on Wall Street to the New York Club on Broadway and 25th Street in the middle of the infamous blizzard of
In Madison Square, near the corner of 23rd Street and Madison Avenue, stands a bronze statue of Senator Roscoe Conkling, a politician that almost nobody remembers today. The site of the statue marks the spot where Conkling collapsed in a snow drift at the height of New York&#;s most catastrophic weather event &#; the great blizzard of At the opposite corner of the park is another statue &#; this one of President Chester Arthur. The lives of the two men were linked in a dramatic tale of New York politics in the Gilded Age.
Conkling was a larger than life figure during the years following the Civil War. One of his senate colleagues said of him, &#;While his fellow senators favored black, Roscoe was a virtual bird of paradise &#; he sported green trousers, scarlet coats, striped shirts and yellow shoes.&#; Presumably not at the same time. He was a protean power in the New York Republican political machine, with a ferocious temper, an athletic figure in an era of portly public men and his personal charisma was said to be irresistible to women. Many men considered him a &#;strutting dandy&#;. His supposed affair with Kate Chase Sprague, wife of another senator and daughter of t
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