Amiable Child Monument: Difference between revisions

The '''''Amiable Child Monument''''' is a monument located in New York City's [[Riverside Park (Manhattan)|Riverside Park]]. It stands west of the southbound lanes of [[Riverside Drive (Manhattan)|Riverside Drive]] north of 122nd Street in [[Morningside Heights, Manhattan]].<ref name="appel">{{cite journal| last=Appel| first=Jacob M.| date=Fall 2009| title=Mourning in Morningside: Mysteries of Manhattan Island's Amiable Child| journal=Palo Alto Review| pages=38–39}}</ref>

It is a monument to a small boy who died in what was then an area of country homes near New York City. One side of the monument reads: “Erected to the Memory of an Amiable Child, St. Claire Pollock, Died 15 July 1797 in the Fifth Year of His Age.”<ref name="rpf">{{cite web|url=http://www.riversideparkfund.org/visit/amiable-child-monument |title=Amiable Child Monument |publisher=Riverside Park Fund |accessdateaccess-date=1 February 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100619122411/http://www.riversideparkfund.org/visit/amiable-child-monument |archive-date=19 June 2010 }}</ref> The monument is composed of a granite urn on a granite pedestal inside a wrought iron fence. It is across the street from [[Grant's Tomb]]. The monument, originally erected by George Pollock, who was either the boy's father or his uncle, has been replaced twice due to deterioration. The present marker was placed on the site in 1967 to replace a marble marker installed by the city in 1897.<ref name="appel"/>

During [[Morningside Heights, Manhattan|Morningside Heights]]’s Golden Age, when the nearby Claremont Inn served luminaries that included [[George M. CohenCohan]], [[Cole Porter]], [[Lillian Russell]] and Mayor [[Jimmy Walker]], the site inspired pilgrimages and poetry. Of the many verses written about the memorial is Herman George Scheffauer’s “An Amiable Child,” which describes the grave as being “like a song of peace in iron frays.”<ref name="appel"/> An identically- named poem by Anna Markham, wife of proletarian author and critic [[Edwin Markham]], opens with the lines that defined the monument for her contemporaries: “At Riverside, on the slow hill-slant / Two memoried graves are seen / A granite dome is over Grant / and over a child the green.”<ref name="appel"/> The monument is also the inspiration for [[Irene Marcuse]]'s novel ''Death of an Amiable Child''.