On a Pedestal

“All girls cannot be perfect 36s, with bodies of mystic warmth and plastic marble effect, colored with rose and a dash of flame. Of course not,” said Audrey Munson, model for the gilded statue of Civic Fame atop the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, installed 1913. She lives on as Columbia Triumphant in Columbus Circle, in the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive, in the figures of Brooklyn and Manhattan now flanking the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum, and as the personifications of Asia, America, Europe and Africa on the portico of the Alexander Hamilton Custom House at 1 Bowling Green. She began as a chorus girl on Broadway and appeared nude in a 1915 film. After attempting suicide with bichloride of mercury in 1922 Munson was committed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, upstate New York, where she died in 1996 at the age of 104.