Standing vigil adjacent to Philipse Manor Hall for nearly a century is the Spanish-American War monument. The 7’ 7” bronze soldier perched atop an 8’ high granite pedestal was the creation of Isidore Konti, a Hungarian sculptor who had a successful artistic career in Europe before coming to the United State and eventually settling in Yonkers. The Spanish-American War itself took place in 1898 and primarily involved military actions in Cuba. Meanwhile the Philippine Insurrection and Boxer Rebellion were taking place in the Pacific. Konti’s statue was unveiled in 1928 and is dedicated to the soldiers, sailors, and marines from Yonkers who served in all these engagements.
Isidore Konti was born in Vienna in 1862. He studied at Vienna’s Imperial Academy of Art in his mid-teens and subsequently earned a scholarship to further his education touring the great museums of Italy for two years. An established artist within European circles by his twenties, Konti moved to the United States in the early 1890s around his thirtieth year. Commissions came quickly, including for Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. World’s Fairs were a significant part of the culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in addition to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, Konti created works for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, among others. Based primarily in New York City by the turn of the twentieth century, Konti made tablets and sculptures for communities across the county. Konti was less an innovator than a solid practitioner of the Beaux Arts style popular in the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also mentored younger artists. These included Paul Manship, who apprenticed in Konti’s studio for a crucial period in Manship’s artistic development in 1908-09. Konti also encouraged his young protégé to follow in his footsteps and apply for a competitive scholarship to study art in Rome, which Manship duly won.[i] A good joiner who was supportive of other artists and known for his laid-back personality, Isidore Konti in his lifetime held membership, and often leadership positions, in such organizations as the National Sculpture Society, the Salmagundi Club, the National Arts Club, the Architectural League, and other professional associations.
Konti settled in Yonkers in 1906 and was active in the city’s art scene for more than three decades until his death in 1938. He was also an engaged citizen. In 1914 he and others discussed creating what would become the Yonkers Art Association. Officially founded in 1915, the mission of the Yonkers Art Association was “to foster a taste for art by exhibitions and lectures; to render all possible aid in beautifying the city of Yonkers by cooperating with the Municipal Art Commission; and to care for and encourage permanent exhibition of works of art.”[ii]
In 1919 Konti and his colleagues in the Yonkers Art Association were instrumental in founding the Yonkers Museum, a modest institution comprised mainly of a small collection minerals, fossils, gemstones, and other items of geologic interest housed in borrowed gallery space within City Hall. From these humble beginnings the Yonkers Museum evolved in the mid-1920s into the Yonkers Museum of Science and Arts, based in the Trevor Mansion on Warburton Avenue overlooking the Hudson River. Yonkers mayor Ulrich Wiesendanger appointed Isidore Konti and eight others to be its commissioners in May 1924.[iii] The Yonkers Museum of Science and Arts eventually became today’s Hudson River Museum.
The Great War had devastated Isidore Konti’s European homeland. It also took a toll on Yonkers; nearly 7,000 residents — men and women — served in uniform stateside or abroad, and of those 173 lost their lives.[iv] Here in his adopted city civic leaders invited Konti to build a memorial to the fallen. Yonkers was hardly unique; as many as 10,000 Great War statues, tablets and monuments in all shapes, sizes, and varieties were constructed in the United States.[v] Most of these were dedicated in the years between the Armistice and onset of the Great Depression. Isidore Konti designed at least four Great War memorials in Yonkers: tablets in 1919 for the men of Konti’s own 8th Ward who had been killed, and for the young men of School 23 who had served; a tablet for School 18 (today the Ella Fitzgerald Academy) dedicated in March 1922 to four alumni killed in the conflict; and the war memorial in front of City Hall dedicated with great fanfare later that spring. The bronze memorial in front of City Hall shows a woman standing in the center of four rows of names listing the 173 citizens who made the ultimate sacrifice. In the ensuing decades the city of Yonkers has added further tablets in which are carved the names of residents killed in the nation’s later conflicts.
Civic leaders clearly were proud of the Great War memorial and its creator. At the time of the monument’s dedication The Herald Statesman wrote that “Today our best-known artist is the sculptor, Isidore Konti, N.A., whose monumental figures, tablets, and busts are almost world-wide in their distribution, his fountain groups and small pieces adorn many parks, estates, and homes.”[vi]
By the mid-1920s, at the height of the Jazz Age, the need for a local monument commemorating those who had served in the Spanish-American War and concurrent military engagements grew increasingly evident. A 1924 U.S. Department of the Interior report noted that while the overall number of veterans’ pensions had dropped precipitously over the previous year, largely due to the passing of aging Civil War veterans, the number of Spanish-American War pensions had increased from less than 17,000 to more than 85,000 as the men who had fought in that conflict reached middle age and retirement.[vii]
In October 1927, city aldermen approved $10,000 in funds for a Spanish-American War monument.[viii] Konti was the natural choice and got down to work quickly. By July 1928 the figure was being cast at the Gorham Foundry in Providence, Rhode Island. The Gorham Company had been a leader in metal smithing for nearly a century and had cast previous works for Isidore Konti, including the Yonkers World War memorial that would stand before City Hall. By mid-September 1928 the Spanish-American War monument was in place on Larkin Plaza, covered in tarpaulins until the official unveiling the following month.[ix]
Konti’s Spanish-American War monument fit neatly into a wider project taking place at the same time. After years of planning and more than $1,000,000 in expenditures (approximately $18,700,000 in today’s dollars) civic leaders converted what had once been an eyesore into Larkin Plaza.[x] It was a natural location for internal improvements, sitting as it does adjacent to Philipse Manor Hall. The colonial-era house has stood on what are today the corners of Warburton Avenue and Dock Street since 1682, anchoring the community through centuries of change. The house had been turned over to the State of New York as a historic site just a decade previously in 1912. One of the central features of the new Larkin Plaza was the stately new Post Office Building situated on Main Street across from the Yonkers train station. Yonkers dedicated the Plaza and the Post Office on Columbus Day, October 12, 1928. These activities were themselves part of the wider City Beautiful Movement taking place throughout the country, a theory of urban design whose proponents believed that communities can be made safer, healthier, and happier by beautifying and improving the shared public space.
Konti’s Spanish-American War monument was dedicated later that same month on October 27, 1928. Two thousand residents turned out for a parade. In the procession were high school bands, active-duty military units, local leaders, and Spanish-American and other war veterans dating back more than half a century. Over six decades after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, nine aged Civil War veterans were chauffeured in cars at the dedication.[xi] There were numerous speeches and the statue itself was unveiled by local Boy Scout Charles F. Merritt and Margaret T. McCarthy, a young girl whose father has served in both the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection.[xii]
Isidore Konti lived another decade and had many additional artistic triumphs, including the Abraham Lincoln statue he executed for the city of Yonkers in 1929. He died on January 11, 1938. Today his works reside in such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in schools, on courthouse squares, in cemeteries, and elsewhere throughout both Europe and the United States. Philipse Manor Hall is fortunate to have one of his most iconic works standing within view of the historic site right here in the city that Konti came to call home.
Keith Muchowski is a librarian and historian at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn. Follow him at https://revolutionarywarmemory.substack.com/.
[i] Harry Rand, Paul Manship (Washington and London: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press,1989), 14.
[ii] Yonkers Art Association, The Yonkers Art Association, 1915-1940 (Yonkers: Yonkers Art Association, 1940), no page number.
[iii] “Mayor Appoints Nine Members of Museum Directors,” The Yonkers Statesman, April 28, 1924, 1.
[iv] “6,909 Served During War,” The Herald Statesman, December30, 1921, 16.
[v] Lisa W. Foderaro “Defaced World War I Memorial in Brooklyn Is Rebuilt,” New York Times, September 11, 2014, A20.
[vi] Wells M. Sawyer, “City Has Produced Artists of Renown; Konti, Famed Sculptor, Is Best Known,” The Herald Statesman, June 3, 1922, 6.
[vii] “14,000 Pensioners Drop From Rolls in 1924,” The Herald Statesman, November 11, 1924, 1.
[viii] “Vote $10,000 for War Memorial,” The Herald Statesman, October 26, 1927, 2.
[ix] “Erect Monument to Spanish War Vets,” The Herald Statesman, September 17, 1928, 2.
[x] “Yonkers Will Celebrate Tomorrow the Completion of Two Projects, The Larkin Plaza and Post Office Building,” The Herald Statesman, October 11, 1928, 17.
[xi] “Spanish War Memorial Unveiled; 2,000 Gather to Pay Tribute,” The Yonkers Statesman, October 29, 1928, 3.
[xii] “Children of War Heroes to Unveil New Monument,” The Yonkers Statesman, October 24, 1928, 4.
