The Lafayette Memorial Centennial Ceremony

Wonderful unplanned things can happen when you’re lucky enough to live in New York. I went for a walk today and about a block from my house I came across…this centennial ceremony commemorating the May 10, 1917 unveiling of Daniel Chester French’s Lafayette Memorial in Prospect Park. It was sponsored by the American Friends of Lafayette organization, and the speakers’ program included the French Consul, a Brooklyn Deputy Borough President, and historians and art critics. Opera singers sang the American and French national anthems, and in the approved French fashion, the event climaxed with the laying-on of a wreath. It was all quite moving and unexpected. It’s just the sort of thing I would have attended had I known in advance. It seemed like kismet that I should have been walking in the vicinity at just the right time.

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But wait! Who’s this “Lafayette”, some of the less patriotic of you will ask. Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was a hero of the American Revolution and two separate revolutions in his native France.

Lafayette was one of the George Washington’s top generals during the Revolution, though he was only serving in a volunteer capacity. His monument arrived just as America entered World War One, a perfect moment to cement and celebrate America’s long-standing friendship with our ally France.

If you keep your eyes open, you will find Lafayette honored throughout New York City:

As well as this: here

Some other shots of that Brooklyn memorial:

And I also came across this plaque on a recent trip to my old haunts in Newport, Rhode Island, where he was headquartered for a time. 

And there’s more. I learned that my father’s hometown Fayetteville, Tennessee is named after….Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is named after…the Marquis de Lafayette. And you will find places called Lafayette and Fayetteville and variations thereon in places big and small across America, especially back east.

Read those plaques! Signed, someone who has written plaques that no one reads.