Bridgeport’s Christopher Columbus statue holds many histories

Oct 13, 2017 1041

BY: Cedar Attanasio

As city workers tried tried again Wednesday to wash red paint from a statue of Christopher Columbus vandalized over the weekend, one of them remembered watching the sculpture’s unveiling with his mother in 1965, when he was 8 years old. “I thought it was an incredibly proud moment for the city of Bridgeport,” Kevin Monks said. “What a beautiful statue, and the sea over here ... and it’s lasted all the years, until somebody decides to put graffiti all over a statue, which is pretty much a relic of our city here.”

Police continued to look for witnesses to Sunday night’s defacement, in which vandals splashed the statue with blood-red paint and left the message “Kill the Colonizer” at its base. For the Italian-American artist who designed the bronze statue, the explorer’s legacy had been well worth preserving, more than half a century ago. “(Columbus) was a man of decision, purpose, vision, strength and adventure,” sculptor Clemente Spampinato told the Bridgeport Sunday Post in 1962, as his future patrons scraped the funds together for the commission.

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SOURCE: http://www.ctpost.com

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