300-Foot Columbus Statue to Displace San Juan Residents

Christopher Columbus is making landfall, and the natives are nervous.

Residents in the seaside suburb of Catano are angry over plans to demolish their homes to make way for a statue of Christopher Columbus that rivals the Statue of Liberty in size. Planners changed the statue’s site recently because it would have threatened landing aircraft.

“I have no problem with the idea of the statue--but after 40 years living in the same houses, why should we be the ones to move?” asked Griselle Gonzalez, 43.

Catano Mayor Edwin Rivera Sierra originally planned to put the bronze colossus, a gift to Puerto Rico from sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, in a park near San Juan’s light-aircraft Fernando Ribas Dominicci Airport.

After the Federal Aviation Administration protested, planners shortened the 350-foot statue to about 300 feet--making it slightly shorter than the Statue of Liberty and her pedestal, but still twice as high as Lady Liberty herself.

They also agreed to move it one mile southeast, to a point on San Juan Bay roughly on top of Gonzalez’s modest pink-and-white house. Hers and at least nine other houses will have to be demolished, Rivera said.

Tsereteli, who came to inspect the condition of the 660-ton statue, was unmoved by the controversy. He said he had lost his home in his native Georgia, the former Soviet republic, to make way for a construction project.

“It doesn’t bother me because the same thing happened to me,” he said.

The mayor was more conciliatory. “I don’t want to move those people, they know I don’t,” he said. “But there’s no other alternative--there’s nowhere else I could put it.”

The city will benefit from the thousands of tourists the statue is expected to attract annually, he said.

Expropriating the homes will add at least $1 million to the $30-million cost of assembling the 2,750 pieces of the statue, Rivera said. Construction is to start in February and finish in time for Oct. 12, 2000--Columbus Day.

Angry residents said they learned about the demolition in newspapers. They say they might sue to stop the project.

“I mean, look at this view--would you give this up?” asked Evelyn Martinez, 48, waving at Old San Juan’s skyline from her porch. Across the bay, pastel-colored Spanish buildings and hulking 18th-century fortresses rose over glittering blue water.

“I don’t care what they’ll pay us, you can’t put a price on that.”