Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday he wants the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate two Christopher Columbus statues.
He deserves thanks for agreeing to take a long-overdue step to preserve the explorer’s central place in American history and Italian American identity.
It’s a stark contrast from mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, who in 2020 tweeted an image of himself giving a latex-gloved middle finger to Columbus’ statue in Astoria captioned, “Take it down.”
No, Assemblyman. These statues deserve to stand proudly in honor of the New World’s first immigrant and all who followed him.
Italian Americans revere Columbus as a hero because he was one.
He dared to go where others wouldn’t. His contemporaries believed he would perish on the open sea.
Instead, he forever expanded humanity’s horizons. His transatlantic crossing inaugurated the most consequential migration in history.
Columbus set his eyes on a new continent as millions of his countrymen would centuries later. In his voyage, generations of Italian Americans have seen their own.
Like him, they set out for a distant and strange land, often guided by little more than legends. In him, they see the immense courage needed to leave behind everything and risk it all — including their lives — in search of opportunity, progress and prosperity.
Through him, they honor a man of faith, the embodiment of a people who believe in a higher power and are willing to sacrifice for a better future, refusing to be defined by fears and limitations.
Yes, Columbus had flaws, as we all do. To acknowledge his moral complexity and administrative foibles does not deny his greatness.
He was a man of remarkable courage and vision yet not immune to temptation.
But he was no monster. He lived in a harsher and more violent age, in circumstances far removed from our own.
Some of the resulting interactions between Europeans and American Indians were brutal.
Such violence cannot be excused, but neither should it obscure his monumental accomplishments.
Ironically, for well over a century, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks and others have fought to claim Columbus as their own, seeking to crown their cultures with a figure of such world-historical significance.
They’re clamoring to adopt a figure Mamdani and his allies foolishly wish to erase.
If anything, Columbus’ story should remind us to be vigilant for the moral blind spots that exist in every age, including our own.
Columbus’ detractors fail to recognize he reunited the human family after ten millennia of partial isolation.
The people of the Americas had been cut off from the rest of the world after the Bering Strait, which brought the first humans from Siberia to North America, flooded.
Columbus indeed discovered — brought to mutual consciousness — unknown lands and peoples.
For this reason, science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson calls Columbus’ voyage the most significant event in our species’ history.
From a civilizational perspective, it’s irrelevant whether the Vikings were the first Europeans in the Americas.
The fact remains that before Columbus, the Western Hemisphere had no contact with anyone from another continent.
After Columbus, no corner of the world would be unknown to humanity.
This unification reached its zenith in the United States, a nation of immigrants where all are equal under law, regardless of origin, faith, race or belief.
The Founding Fathers honored Columbus by naming the fledgling nation’s capital after him — a tribute befitting a new beginning.
Since then, the American people have borne the restless ambition and entrepreneurial spirit of the Italian who stepped from European oak onto North American soil.
It was this spirit that carried my maternal grandparents from Orsogna, a rural village in Abruzzo, Italy, to Astoria in 1960.
They became proud American citizens, never allowing my family to take for granted the unparalleled opportunity of their new home.
But they and my mother would not let me forget the language, traditions and history that shaped our ancestors and continue to shape me.
We still turn a half-ton of tomatoes into sauce in my backyard every August.
I speak Abruzzo’s distinctive dialect at home but write in Alexander Hamilton’s newspaper. God bless America.
We owe it to future generations of Italian Americans to champion Columbus as part of their civilizational inheritance.
Through the guidance of devoted teachers like Teresa Tallini and Joe Licata, I came to know the brilliance of the Italian people — from Vitruvius to da Vinci, Columbus to Verdi — as a living tradition.
And thanks to the efforts of groups like the Columbus Citizens Foundation and the Italian American Museum, that tradition endures in this city’s public life.
Columbus’ story shows that, despite our flaws, we can defy mediocrity and achieve renown.
His statues deserve landmarking — not just as monuments to a man but as tributes to our nation and its people, who still dare to embark on life’s great adventures.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
