Ulysses Grant Heirs Issue Unconditional Demand: Fix Tomb
The descendants of President Ulysses S. Grant threatened Saturday to move the bodies of the Civil War hero and his wife out of Grant’s Tomb unless the blighted site gets a multimillion-dollar renovation.
The family, represented by the President’s great-great-grandson, Ulysses Grant Dietz, delivered the same message to the National Park Service at a meeting Friday.
The tomb, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has become a magnet for the homeless, graffiti and drug use in recent years. Although federal officials announced a plan to spend $375,000 on the site this year, the Grant family was not appeased.
“The government is basically throwing nickels and dimes at the site,” Dietz said.
No one was in the Park Service’s offices Saturday to comment. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had said earlier that the site could use up to $10 million in renovations.
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