“The Little Mermaid” by Edvard Eriksen

When we were in Copenhagen last week for a gathering of the lawyers of the Rome District Chapter, we sought out this diminutive landmark because it reminded us of an immigration debate from many years ago, could Ariel really make the world her oyster?  

Perched atop a rock at the Copenhagen Harbor sits “The Little Mermaid”. Inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a mermaid who gives up everything to fall in love with a prince on land, Danish brewer Carl Jacobsen, known for Carlsberg beer, commissioned Edvard Eriksen to bring  the whimsical princess to life in the form of a statute and gifted it to the city in 1913. According to legend, every morning and every night the mermaid swims from the bottom of the sea to the surface and waits on a rock, hoping to see her prince.  The Danes have proven to have a welcoming spirit to the migrant princess and she has thrived in Denmark for over a hundred years!

The Garment Worker by Judith Weller

Throughout New York City, permanent monuments grace sidewalks, street corners, and parks. Many of those monuments commemorate important events, influential people, and well-known heroes. Some, however, stand in tribute to everyday New Yorkers. Judith Weller’s “The Garment Worker” is one such statue, depicting a man in a yarmulke working at an old-fashioned sewing machine. Weller, originally from Israel, based the figure on memories of her father, a machine operator in the garment industry, similarly bent over a sewing machine hard at work. Jewish immigrants like the man depicted in the statue have a long and storied history in New York, with the first wave of them arriving as early as the 1650s. A few centuries later, from about the 1880s to the 1920s, the Jewish population in New York City boomed, growing by nearly 1 million in just a few decades. Many of these new arrivals ended up working in New York City’s prosperous garment industry, at one point making up a large majority of the labor force in that field. “The Garment Worker” sits at his table on 7th Avenue, a larger-than-life homage to the Jewish garment workers who made up “the backbone of Jewish life in New York at the turn of the century,” and the immigrants who shaped New York City.

Eros in London

Anyone who has ever visited London’s Piccadilly Circus is familiar with the winged statue of Eros, the mischievous Greek god of love, who watches over the popular public space. The statue, designed by English sculptor Alfred Gilbert, sits atop the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, a tribute to the politician and philanthropist, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. A statue of the god of sensual love seems a strange tribute to such a sober figure. And it would be, because the statue is actually (probably) meant to depict Eros’ brother, Anteros, the god of requited love. Gilbert described Anteros as representative of “reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.” Interestingly, the true identity of the figure is a subject of significant debate. Some will claim that Gilbert only called the statue Anteros after receiving criticism from Victorian moralists, scandalized by a nude sculpture displayed in public. In fact, it is due to these very critics that the statue has a third name: “The Angel of Christian Charity.” No matter what you call it, the beautiful statue is an iconic fixture of Piccadilly Circus.