Five years after it was splattered with red paint, toppled and dragged into a lake, the bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that stood for nearly a century in a city park in Richmond, Va., has been fished out, restored and given a new home. It now gazes out at a bocce ball court outside a Sons of Italy lodge some 300 miles away in Blauvelt, N.Y.
Boston's marble Columbus statue was beheaded in 2020 -- its second decapitation. Repaired and given to the Knights of Columbus, it was moved to the garden of a nearby church, where it now stands among religious statues.
And in Baltimore, where protesters pulled down a Columbus statue in 2020 and dumped it into the Inner Harbor, the broken pieces have been retrieved and used to guide the creation of a replica.
The culture war over Columbus statues has entered a new phase.
"Pretty much every October we're going to have a different view of Columbus and therefore of the Columbus statues," said the historian Matthew Restall, who wrote "The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus," a new biography chronicling his contentious legacy. "These are essentially living objects whose meaning is constantly shifting, and so where they are located and how we talk about them has to also be constantly changing. And that's not a bad thing."
Monuments celebrating the Genoese explorer and his voyages were put up across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries by Italian American groups who saw him a symbol of ethnic pride at a time when immigrants from Italy faced persecution and discrimination. In recent decades some of those statues were vandalized by protesters outraged by Columbus's role ushering in an era of mass colonization and oppression of Indigenous people.
Columbus statues became a battleground in the wider confrontation over public monuments in 2020 during the racial justice protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. In the span of four months, more than 30 were dismantled, either toppled by protesters or ordered removed by officials. Now some of those statues are finding new homes at churches, museums, Italian American social clubs and, in one case, outside a baseball stadium in New Jersey.
Many of the statues have been revived with the help of Italian American groups, who cherish Columbus as a figure their ancestors embraced as a hero of the diaspora.
"We repaired it, restored it and found a location where it can be appreciated as a work of art," said John Corritone, who led the efforts to re-erect Richmond's toppled Columbus statue.
As the high tensions of 2020 abated, many local officials trying to figure out what to do with the Columbus statues tucked away in government storage landed on similar compromises: The statues could return, but not to the prominent public squares where they once stood. In Chicago, for example, a bitter legal battle over a statue that was removed in July 2020 ended this year when the city agreed to lend it to a private Italian American museum in development.
None of which is to say the explorer has faded as a source of controversy.
President Trump has put Columbus on a list of statues he wants included in his proposed National Garden of American Heroes. This week he said "We're back, Italians," after he signed a proclamation for Columbus Day, a federal holiday he has called for celebrating after some cities and states have either replaced it or supplemented it with celebrations of Indigenous Peoples' Day.
"Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces," the proclamation reads.
Among some who cheered the removal of Columbus statues from parks and other public commons, the recent revivals have been met with a mixture of dismay and acceptance.
"If Italian American groups or whomever wants to put these statues back up in their museum or in their backyard or wherever, at their expense, I am enough of a believer in freedom of speech," said John Low, a historian and an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians who participated in discussions over statues in Chicago.
"But not on public land and not at public expense," he said.
Many of the statues were conceived not as public commissions, but as gifts from Italian Americans. In Richmond, organizers raised money for their Columbus statue by going door to door to Italian households in 1926. Like many Americans, they celebrated his voyages.
But a darker narrative of the navigator gained increasing traction in the second half of the 20th century. It focused attention on him as a slave trader of Indigenous Taíno people, as well as on the brutal campaign of subjugation waged by Spanish colonists and the decimation of the Indigenous population, through violence and disease, in the century and a half after his voyages.
The Columbus statue in Richmond was among the first to fall in 2020. Demonstrators pulled it down with ropes, set an American flag on fire atop it and dragged it into a lake. Chelsea Higgs Wise, who was at the demonstration and saw the statue come down, said that there had been a sense that "when the people come together, change happens really quickly."
The next day protesters tore down a monument to Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, escalating a furious debate over the city's Confederate monuments.
Angered by the treatment of the Columbus statue, Mr. Corritone and other members of the Italian-American Cultural Association of Virginia made it their mission to find it a new home.
"It gave the Italian immigrants a sense of pride because we were very much looked down on when we came to this country," he said. "We looked at Columbus as sort of our patron saint."
After two years of back-and-forth with the city, the cultural group was given ownership of the statue. In 2023, the seven-foot-tall, 1,000-pound bronze was unloaded from a city yard, where it had been stored alongside street-repair and mowing equipment. It was still caked with red paint, its face stained a ghostly white.
In a restoration process funded by donations, Frank Papik, one of the group's members, spent hours sandblasting off layers of paint and age. A retired welding instructor, Mr. Papik also used silver solder to seal a hole that had opened up on the top of its head. Paul DiPasquale, a local sculptor who oversaw the restoration, sprayed on a patina to protect it from the elements.
But when the group tried to find a new home for it, there was little interest. The Virginia Museum of History and Culture rejected it, Mr. Corritone said, as did a local Catholic church, the Spanish embassy in Washington and a mariners' museum on the coast of Virginia.
Then Mr. Papik called up a friend at the International Union of Operating Engineers, who told him about the Sons of Italy lodge in New York. In 2024, the statue was covered in shrink wrap and trucked to Rockland County, where it was positioned outside the white stucco lodge.
"He's one of us now, Christopher Columbus," said Mike Pizzi, the president of the New York organization at the time of the transfer.
A Columbus statue that once stood in Baltimore remains a collection of broken marble pieces, stored in an artist's studio in Maryland.
Tilghman Hemsley, a local painter, sculptor and fisherman, found himself drawn into the fray after seeing video of the statue being pulled down with ropes on Independence Day in 2020. He soon called up a team of divers to retrieve the pieces which had been dumped in the harbor.
"It struck something in me," Mr. Hemsley said.
Over the next couple of years, his son—a sculptor—used scans of the pieces to create a replica statue—a project that received $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities during President Trump's first term.
John Pica—a former state senator—has shepherded this project along while struggling to find just where they might place their replica. Some hope it might be placed on federal land or maybe even in future Garden of American Heroes.
Jessica Dickerson—a member from Lumbee Tribe North Carolina—has been involved public discussions about Columbus Baltimore; she expressed disappointment regarding persistence statues despite efforts convincing public explorer should not be valorized.
"We're not trying to erase history," Ms.Dickerson said,"we're just trying not celebrate someone who has done so much harm Native people."
Some cities have put up new monuments where their Columbuses once stood. Last year, a bronze Italian immigrant family was unveiled in New Haven, Conn., replacing a Columbus statue that is now on exhibit at a local cabinet-of-curiosities-style museum. Other Columbus replacements include a monument to Harriet Tubman (in Newark), and to St. Francis of Paola (in San Antonio). In Chicago, locals are mulling a statue to Mother Cabrini, the Roman Catholic nun who is considered the patron saint of immigrants.
Still, some Columbus loyalists bristle at the idea that the explorer could be so easily replaced.
"People say why don't you just let Columbus go and have Dante or something?" said Gilda Rorro Baldassari, who is leading efforts to claim a Columbus statue from government storage in Trenton,N.J. "Because it's not the same," she said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.