Civic Virtue ('Fat Boy')

The story

In 1922, sculptor Frederick William MacMonnies unveiled a 17-foot marble monument in Manhattan's City Hall Park, naming it Civic Virtue Triumphant Over Unrighteousness. The allegorical setup was supposed to be noble: a heroic, muscular nude man holding a sword over his shoulder, stepping over two writhing female 'sirens' representing Vice and Corruption. Instead, the public took one look at a giant naked man trampling women and revolted. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia detested the thing—he hated having to look at its exposed marble backside on his daily walk into City Hall—and dubbed it 'Fat Boy.'

In 1941, La Guardia banished the 22-ton sculpture group out to Queens, dumping it at a busy intersection at Queens Boulevard and Union Turnpike in Kew Gardens. It sat outside Queens Borough Hall for more than seven decades, slowly blackening with vehicle exhaust, falling into disrepair, and serving as a reliable target for local politicians who picketed its overt sexism. By 2012, no municipal agency wanted to fund its restoration, and local leaders were desperate to scrub it from public land.

Enter Green-Wood Cemetery. In late 2012, the twice-exiled statue was loaded onto a flatbed truck and hauled across town to Brooklyn under a long-term loan agreement. Now, 'Fat Boy' spends his post-scandal years tucked quietly into the grass among 478 acres of Victorian mausoleums—a disgraced piece of Gilded Age public art sitting in genteel disgrace where nobody can be offended by his backside.