On an inconspicuous spot just north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there stands a memorial that includes, uniquely, a salute to an organization that changed the world for people with mobility disabilities. The memorial honors a patrician New Yorker who devoted much of his life to good works. Highly respected in life but forgotten today, William Church Osborn received in death a public monument of a kind that was already slipping into the past when it first opened in 1953.
William Church Osborn settled in New York City after graduating Harvard Law in 1889, at the age of 26. He moved in the highest of social circles and was clearly a man eager to make an impact. Osborn sought political office and ran or served on the boards of railroad companies, museums, and charities. He served as president or chairman of the board of the Children’s Aid Society for fifty years, and for forty-five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Few men,” The New York Times put it, “made so rich and varied a contribution to their community . . . He brought vitality, intelligence and a deep sense of humanity to every civic task he undertook. . .. Integrity was implicit in thought, word and action.”
After Osborn’s death in 1951 at age 88, his lifelong support of children and the visual arts led to a successful drive for a memorial, next to the museum that he’d led for decades. The memorial was placed at the entrance to a new playground and featured a stunning pair of entry gates depicting scenes from Aesop’s Fables. The gates were designed by Paul Manship, the sculptor whose best-known work is the enormous statue of Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.
Flanking the Manship gates are a pair of granite pylons, designed by architect Aymar Embury II, which recite highlights from Osborn’s career. And that’s where the connection to disability comes in.
William Church Osborn
Among his many accomplishments, Osborn had a nearly half-century role at the resoundingly titled New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled, the nation’s first organization devoted to improving the lives of people with orthopedic or mobility disabilities. Make no mistake–Ruptured and Crippled was at the medical forefront for orthopedic disability, right from the beginning. Now known as the Hospital for Special Surgery, it continues to this day, and Osborn was a principal figure in developing its second hospital building, which opened in 1912 at 42nd Street and Second Avenue. The dates of Osborn’s two stints as President are carved into the right pylon of the memorial.
Every once in a while, people ask me about the Society for the Ruptured and Crippled, and almost invariably the question is prompted by the Osborn pylon. But if you’ve never noticed it, don’t feel too badly, because unless you go looking for the Osborn memorial, you won’t find it. These sorts of memorials to elite New Yorkers were already going out of fashion by 1953, and the style of the postwar period wasn’t really sympathetic to that kind of work. So, the granite pylons at Osborn, for example, were polished to a Modernistic, mirror-like shine which makes the text challenging to read (or to photograph). And although the Manship gates are remarkable pieces of public art, they are necessarily open during the day, so they sit edge-on, at right angles to the sidewalk, hard to spot.
Tucked into the path of a playground, practically in the shadows of the Metropolitan Museum, the Osborn memorial is a time capsule and artwork which stands without drawing notice from the museumgoers, the tourists or the sidewalk vendors (still less the playgrounders themselves). But it’s one of those small miracles of life in our heedless City—and the only place a passer-by can bump into a commemoration to the New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.
Photographs by Warren Shaw. DHNYC thanks Shasuna Lin for her assistance with photo production. For more of Warren’s work in disability history, please go to www.DisabilityHistoryNYC.com