Monumental Differences

San Francisco recently announced an international competition to redesign its down-at-the-heels Union Square, a pigeon-infested park hidden behind high hedges with only a fat lady atop a 90-foot-tall granite column visible from the street. The pillar celebrates Adm. George Dewey’s cakewalk over the decrepit Spanish Navy in Manila Bay in 1898 and is the only part of the square declared off-limits for the redesign.

But members of the local Filipino community were quick to protest that the Dewey monument is what should be changed the most: For them, the Spanish-American War was not a great military victory that marked the rise of the U.S. as a global power but the birth of U.S. imperialism and the exchange of one foreign master for another.

“It was hardy a glorious military victory,” said Rodel Rodis, a member of the San Francisco Community College Board, who would like to see a new inscription giving the other side of the story. “It was, in effect, the beginning of the invasion of the Philippines.”

That, of course, is only one opinion. “PC revisionism run amok,” fumed one writer to a local paper. “ . . . If the city is worth its salt, it would start planning a centennial celebration for this 1898 victory, instead of pondering how to dilute a clear tribute to a great man.”

These days, it’s almost impossible to plan (or even redesign) a public moment or memorial without offending somebody. In a society that exults in differences and micro-identities, finding universal icons--let alone shared historical experiences--suitable for public commemoration has become a walk through a minefield of conflicting sensibilities and irreconcilable perspectives.

“A hundred years from now, when another group of historians are in the ascendancy, you’ll have another past,” said Kevin Starr, the state librarian and historian. “It’s never-ending. Why can’t we just accept our history? Why don’t we take our great novels and have them rewritten to be politically correct? Or repaint paintings?” He opposes reinterpreting historical monuments but at same time is all for designing new ones to address contemporary concerns.

Monuments used to honor battles; now they often cause them. Next month, for example, the long-awaited memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt opens in Washington amid intensive debate. In an early plan, Eleanor Roosevelt was depicted wearing one of her favored fur pieces, but the memorial commission nixed that idea, fearful of animal rights protests.

Fur, nevertheless, has been flying. Roosevelt never walked without help after contracting polio in 1921, but labored for the rest of his life not to be seen as a cripple and was almost never photographed in his wheelchair. The fact of Roosevelt’s debilitation is carved in stone at the memorial--a complex of gardens, waterfalls and open-air galleries on seven acres next to the Tidal Basin--but none of the three statues of the president shows him in a wheelchair. Architect Lawrence Halprin of San Francisco maintains that his design is an accurate depiction of how Roosevelt presented himself. “It is not a memorial to disabledness,” Halprin snapped in one interview, before he stopped discussing the controversy.

On the other hand, critics, such as the National Organization on Disability and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the biographer of Franklin and Eleanor, object that not to show Roosevelt as he really was is to distort history and nurse prejudice. “There are plenty of statues in Washington of men on horseback,” commentator Charles Osgood chimed in. “Maybe it’s time for a man in a wheelchair.”

And just weeks before the scheduled May 2 dedication, 16 of Roosevelt’s grandchildren issued a statement slamming the memorial. “It would be a disservice to history and the public’s interest if the impact of polio on the man were to be hidden,” they said.

So far, no one has suggested that it distorts history not to portray the tobacco-loving president without a cigarette.

While the commemorative conflicts raise worries that public spaces will be dulled by only the most bland of monuments, some planners see hope for a dialogue.

“One of the functions of a city square has to be how do we build a shared sense of community and not just fragment,” said Jim Chappell, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Assn., which is overseeing the Union Square design competition.

“If the design of this square can engage the citizens of San Francisco into a discussion of our history and foreign policy, that’s wonderful. I don’t know if a Corinthian column with a statue of a lady on top can do that, but that’s my fondest hope for the competition.”

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Such clashes may be more common today, but they have deep roots in American democracy. It took close to a century and almost as much debate as the Constitution occasioned to build the first monument on the Mall: George Washington’s obelisk, which early detractors likened to a stalk of asparagus.

What monuments are built to honor, moreover, and what they mean are not always the same. The Statue of Liberty was built by the French to symbolize their friendship with the U.S. but soon became the icon welcoming immigrants to America. (Some scholars have suggested that sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was mostly interested in memorializing his mother.)

Perceptions can change like lightning. Maya Lin’s exceedingly subtle Vietnam War memorial in Washington set off a fierce debate when it was proposed in 1981. One vet called it “a black gash of shame,” and a realistic statue of three soldiers was installed nearby as a peace offering. Yet in almost no time, the wall become a beloved nonjudgmental reminder of a war that tore America apart.

“Debate is healthy,” said planner Chappell. “It should occur. Isn’t that what society is about?”

Even sports heroes can stumble on the slippery terrain of contending histories and sensibilities. It should have been a simple matter for Richmond, Va., to honor its native son Arthur Ashe, who rose from the city’s segregated playgrounds to become the first black winner at Wimbledon; he died in 1993. But then the city decided to place a 12-foot bronze statue of the tennis star on Monument Avenue, where a gallery of Confederate heroes stands proud.

Some whites protested that a piece of modern art honoring a black man would defile the memory of the Lost Cause; others argued that the inclusion of an African American civil rights champion would lend balance to what they consider an odious parade of white supremacists. Still a third view was that the location was an affront to Ashe.

“I am afraid that a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue honors Richmond, Va., more than it does its son, his legacy and his life’s work,” wrote Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the athlete’s widow.

When the statue was finally dedicated on Monument Avenue last summer by Gov. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of a slave, two dozen demonstrators showed up with Confederate flags to protest the “hate crime.”

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You might think it would be easier just to give up on monuments altogether and honor people by, say, naming a street after them. Wrong.

When politicians try to score easy points by sprinkling the names of a few popular heroes here and there, they often run afoul of business owners and residents who don’t want their street signs changed. Years ago, the San Diego City Council renamed its downtown Market Street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., only to have angry citizens reverse the change in a referendum. And Oakland almost switched the name of John Fremont High School to Cesar Chavez until protesters insisted that it would slight the explorer’s memory.

“Honest to God, I don’t know how we ever make a decision these days,” lamented Allan Jacobs, who teaches planning at UC Berkeley. “You eliminate the best and the worst and you get the blandest. It’s tougher than it ever has been to get a good design and act on it.”

Jacobs once made a modest proposal to line San Francisco’s Market Street with busts every 50 feet from the Ferry Building to City Hall several miles away. On one side of the street, an official committee would select heroes to commemorate. On the other side, anyone could install a bust of anyone they wanted--as long as they paid for it, as well as for one of the official selections, although they couldn’t pick which one.

“The whole street would be lined with wonderful busts, but no one would give a damn anymore,” Jacobs said with a chuckle.

* Times researcher Jacquelyn Cenacveira contributed to this story.