. . above: click on image above for a larger version of our Bring Her Home calendar, which is formatted for a 5″x7″ print. . Please download, use, and share. 

It has been nine months since we began asking the Mayor and City Council of Schenectady to honor and implement the Gateway Plaza Implementation Plan (2013) and return the City’s replica Lady Liberty statue to her home, Liberty-Gateway Park. Since that time, Mayor Gary McCarthy has not given us any justification for failing to follow the fully approved Implementation Plan, saying only that “our design team” recommended not returning Lady Liberty.

The Design Team is basically Mary Moore Wallinger, who was the primary author of the Implementation Plan that promised return of the statue, and is Chair of the City’s Planning Commission. Ms. Wallinger either never wanted Lady Liberty to return, and proposed the return to avoid controversy during the planning process, or simply changed her mind and decided on her own, with no public notice or input, to send the Statue of Liberty replica elsewhere. Why? At first Wallinger advanced the silly excuse that Lady Liberty was too small for the Plaza; she then merely noted at a City Council meeting that “plans change”, and settled on the sad and insufficient excuse that the Lady is not “contemporary” enough to fit her image of the new Plaza.

•  For a full discussion of the planning history and Change of Mind, with images and arguments, see our posting “Lady Liberty is Timeless” (March 26, 2018). The image at the head of this blurb is a detail from a rendering in the adopted Final Report of the City of Schenectady Gateway Plaza, showing Lady Liberty back at her Home Park.

Throughout 2018, Mayor Gary McCarthy has indicated he has been too busy to make a decision and direct Ms. Wallinger, whose LAndArt Studio is the “construction administrator” of Gateway Park, to arrange to return Lady Liberty (after its mysteriously damaged base is repaired). At no point has anyone at City Hall offered a justification for ignoring an implementation plan that went through a full design process, with public input and agreement, and approval by City Council in a Resolution naming the Implementation Plan an official Document of the City, which the Mayor signed. There is no safety or financial basis for ignoring the approved Plan. There is only the change of personal change of mind by Ms. Wallinger.

We ask that the Mayor, Ms. Wallinger, and City Council resolve to return the Lady Liberty statue to an appropriate location in her home Park as soon as winter’s end allows for the installation. Surely, our so-called Smart City is wise enough to do the right thing. Returning Lady Liberty would be an important step toward gaining the trust of the public, and give us reason to hope the New Year moves Schenectady toward having a City Hall its people can respect.