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If you want to find a mirror of a society’s ideal—the image of what it hopes and imagines itself to be—public sculpture is as good a place as any to start, and none is more common or readily available than the public sculpture we carry around with us on the Nassau Street was named some time before 1696 in honor of William of Nassau, the Dutch prince who became King William III of England in a 1689 coup d’etat. Now largely a pedestrian mall, it winds south from its intersection with Park Row at Printing House Square to Wall Street. Much of it is lined with late-Victorian office buildings, their imposing masonry and cast-iron facades rising almost unnoticed above the frenetic retailing on their ground floors. Acurrent off-off-Broadway production, Miami Beach Monsters, revolves around the notion that several classic movie monsters, now retired to Florida, are rediscovered thanks to a new issue of commemorative postage stamps. (Dracula, apparently, complaining he never consented to the use of his image). This charming notion is already old-hat The Lincoln cent was first struck in 1909. Its obverse portrait of the sixteenth president, designed by Victor David Brenner and bulldozed through the Mint bureaucracy by President Theodore Roosevelt, is the nation’s oldest circulating coin design. With over a billion pennies minted annually, this portrait is the |
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