NEW YORK — It’s a rough time for a famous statue of the Rough Rider.
New York City officials have agreed to a request by the American Museum of Natural History to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stands in front of the museum’s main entrance on Central Park West.
The city-owned statue depicts Roosevelt — the 26th president — riding a horse as a Native American man and an African warrior walk alongside him.
Museum officials decided to remove the statute “because it explicitly depicts black and indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement Sunday.
“The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue,” de Blasio said.
As a sort of compensation for the statue’s removal, Roosevelt — whose family was among the museum’s founders, and whose great-grandson is today a museum trustee — will be honored by having the museum’s Hall of Biodiversity named for him.
City and museum officials have been talking for years about whether to remove the statue.
A mayoral commission spent much of 2017 and 2018 studying whether to remove it, the museum said on its website.
But the commission couldn’t make up its mind, and the city decided the statue should stay in place.
Last year, the museum opened an exhibit called Addressing the Statue, about its history and how people felt about it.
“We are proud of that work, which helped advance our and the public’s understanding of the statue and its history and promoted dialogue about important issues of race and cultural representation,” the museum said in its statement Sunday.
“(B)ut in the current moment, it is abundantly clear that this approach is not sufficient … We believe that the statue should no longer remain and have requested that it be removed.”
The statue was commissioned in 1925 — six years after Roosevelt’s death — and was installed in 1940. The statue and the area around the Central Park West entrance to the museum are deemed the official New York State memorial to Roosevelt.
It’s unclear what will happen to the statue after it is removed.
The museum has long dealt with racial issues in its history and its exhibits.
One of its earliest scientists, paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn — who was the museum’s president for 25 years — believed in eugenics.
During the 1960s, civil rights groups attacked displays that reflected Osborn’s beliefs, and the museum replaced its Hall of the Age of Man, which Osborn opened around 1920, with a new display area called the Hall of the Biology of Man.
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