Amiable Child Monument: Difference between revisions

During Morningside’s Golden Age, when the nearby Claremont Inn served luminaries that included [[George M. Cohen]], [[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>Appel, Jacob M. Mourning in Morningside: Mysteries of Manhattan Island's Amiable Child, Palo Alto Review, Fall 2009, Pp. 38-39.</ref> 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>Appel, Jacob M. Mourning in Morningside: Mysteries of Manhattan Island's Amiable Child, Palo Alto Review, Fall 2009, Pp. 38-39.</ref> By one late nineteenth century account, as related by Donald Reynolds, an attempt to relocate the grave in order to clear space for General Grant’s tomb, which was quickly abandoned by the city after a groundswell of public opposition, transformed the “tribute to the gentleness that underlies the apparent brutality of the great city” into “almost a national institution.”<ref>Appel, Jacob M. Mourning in Morningside: Mysteries of Manhattan Island's Amiable Child, Palo Alto Review, Fall 2009, Pp. 38-39.</ref>

 

 

The monument is the namesake of [[Irene Marcuse]]'s novel, Death of an Amiable Child.