Is Grant’s Tomb with a View a Monument That Works?

As memorials go, it’s had ups and downs.

E arlier this week, I wrote about Grant Cottage, the modest, rural house near Saratoga where Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) heroically finished his memoirs — crippled with a cancerous throat, tongue, and jaw — and, three days later, died, his last mission finished. Having done humble and woodsy, today I’m going grand and metro. Last week, I visited Grant’s Tomb or, more precisely, the General Grant National Memorial, on Riverside Drive and 122nd Street in Manhattan, near the Columbia campus. Dedicated in 1897, it’s the biggest tomb in America and was, for years, the cathartic, anchor memorial to the spirit of the Civil War, embodied by Grant.

Like Grant, it’s had its ups and downs. Does it still work? And what’s its art history? Why is it in New York?

Grant’s cancer and grim prognosis were a front-page news story before he left Manhattan for the placid setting and fresh, cool mountain air up north. With all, including Grant and his family, expecting an interment on the horizon, “where” was a topic. Grant was, after all, the world’s most famous American. He was revered for his generalship during the Civil War but also for his compassion and forward thinking when dealing with the South.

People with pitches to his oldest son, Fred, made their way to the cottage, and to Grant. Washington? Wives weren’t allowed to be buried in federal military cemeteries, and Grant wanted Julia, his wife of 37 years, by his side when her time came. Nixed. St. Louis? Grant’s wife grew up nearby, on a farm worked by slaves, and nearby was the aptly named “Hardscrabble” cabin that Grant built as he failed at farming. Too grim a chapter. Nixed. Then there was Galena, where Grant lived in the late 1860s, or “someplace else in Illinois,” as Grant put it in his own musings. The idea never got beyond “vague.”

New York City’s mayor, William Grace, telegraphed Fred Grant the afternoon of Grant’s death with two concrete proposals, with municipal land offered gratis. The Grants had enjoyed living in Manhattan. Even having been swindled of all his money by Ferdinand Ward, his investment firm partner, Grant was treated as a hero wherever he went. What better place to resurrect than in the City That Never Sleeps?

One proposal was Central Park, close to the Grant home on 3 E. 66th Street, which might have been lost in Ward’s swindle but for William Vanderbilt securing it for Julia’s lifetime. Julia thought Central Park was so busy that neither she nor her husband could rest in peace, though, being dead, they would not have been disturbed even by Bruce Springsteen’s No Nukes concert in 1982. But the site in the park was already fully landscaped with flowering shrubs and mature elms, meaning the tomb would have to be integrated into it. Nixed.

Up north, to Riverside Park? Remote, yes, and undeveloped, but that meant a blank canvas. The Upper West Side was elegantly and quickly moving north from the 1870s to the ’90s and expected to continue. Morningside Heights wasn’t Manhattan’s highest point, but it was close. The tomb would have a view but, more to the point, could be seen from New Jersey, much of Manhattan, the Hudson, and the mouth of Long Island Sound. And rumor had it that Columbia would relocate its campus nearby. “Mother takes Riverside,” Fred replied.

John Duncan, a young architect, designed the monument. The tomb’s exterior was inspired by the stepped, pyramidical Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, built in the late 350s b.c. in Turkey for the grave of Mausolus, a Persian satrap. It was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world but demolished in 1494, so no one in Grant’s time had ever seen it. The Pantheon in Rome also figured in the tomb’s design. Both offered geometric rigor that Grant would have liked. He’s still famous for his clarity, ruthless logic, and superpower of cutting straight through chaos. And both were emblems of magnificence. Plenty of ego ran in Grant’s family, and in Grant, too.

For the interior, Les Invalides in Paris was a model. There, Napoleon’s hunk of red porphyry tomb resides in a sunken, open crypt beneath a soaring dome. The two sarcophagi in Grant’s Tomb, one for Ulysses and one for Julia, are each 17,000 pounds of red granite and meant to emulate Napoleon’s. Viewers of the Bonaparte and Grant sarcophagi are compelled to bow their heads to look down, ideally thinking reverent thoughts.

Grant died on the morning of July 23, three days after putting his pencil down and whispering, “It is done.” His memoirs were among the century’s best sellers. Royalties in today’s dollars were in the many millions, and, for once, the Grants didn’t lose it. His funeral on August 1 was in the front yard of what’s now Grant Cottage. Though thousands of mourners surrounded the house, it was a small family affair compared with the procession of his casket on August 8 from City Hall near Manhattan’s southern tip — Grant lay in state there for a day — to a temporary tomb in Riverside Park, about six miles north. It looked like a brick powder magazine. Grant was to lie there for twelve years.

It was estimated then that 1.5 million people saw the procession, a meticulously choreographed affair with 60,000 marchers, many Union and Confederate veterans, 200 bands of musicians, President Cleveland, former presidents Hayes and Arthur, all of Cleveland’s cabinet and the Supreme Court, nearly all of Congress, nearly every governor, and Confederate and Union generals. People with a view said it moved like a great river.

All the onlookers wore black. Bloomingdale’s alone sold five miles of black crepe to decorate homes and businesses. People climbed rooftops and trees, and heads stuck out from windows. Ferdinand Ward, in jail on Ludlow Street pending his trial for the Ponzi scheme that drove Grant to destitution, bribed a guard to let him out for the day to watch. New York ticker-tape parades didn’t start until 1886. It wasn’t until 1927 — the parade for Charles Lindbergh after his flight to France — that a public gathering in America drew a bigger crowd.

The exterior of Grant’s Tomb is blue-gray Maine granite. Its ten columns on the landing, after two spare flights of stairs — six in front, four behind them — are Doric. The colonnade beneath the stepped roof is Ionic. There’s no long ornamental or narrative frieze. Rather, a thin entablature with wreaths and circular bosses runs the length of the front above the Doric columns. Wooden entrance doors, 4 feet wide and 16 feet tall, are covered with nearly 300 rosettes. The tomb is 150 feet tall and sits 230 feet above the Hudson. It still pokes out from among fully grown, stately trees.

At the center of the pediment is Grant’s epitaph — “Let Us Have Peace” — flanked on each side by a figure of a reclining woman, one representing peace, the other victory. The Greek cross-shaped interior is nearly entirely white marble. The circular dome is coffered. Amber-colored glass windows decorate the eastern, western, and northern arms. These replaced clear but curtained windows in the 1930s, in an effort to relieve the interior’s spartan look.

In 1966, mosaic battle scenes and the surrender at Appomattox were added to the lunettes, again for more color. And for variety, on the wall surrounding the sarcophagi are five niches, each with a bronze bust of a Civil War general. These were added in the 1930s. Still, the overall look is severe. There’s mood lighting, which softens things a little, but I still thought about Franz Kline’s black-and-white slasher paintings.

For 50 years, Grant’s Tomb was New York’s top tourist attraction. Over time, though, more and more Civil War veterans joined Grant in Valhalla. The last died in 1956, age 106, but Americans are a here-and-now people. World War I, the Depression, and World War II displaced the Civil War as America’s Ground Zero. Tomb maintenance was deferred by its minder, the chronically broke Grant Monument Association.

The ’70s were rock-bottom for both the tomb and New York. Crime, drug dealing, trash, and disrespect plagued Riverside Park. Historians labeled Grant the Great Butcher and said he was a front for carpetbaggers and scalawags. Harry Truman, unknown for graciousness, said Grant was the biggest presidential crook of all time, until, that is, Harding. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the 1936 movie, Gary Cooper’s character visits Grant’s Tomb with his girlfriend, who says, “To most people, it’s an awful letdown.” Cooper answers, “That depends on what they see. . . . I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great solider. . . . I can see the beginning of new nation. . . . I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as president. Things like that can only happen in a country like America.” Deeds was an old soul, though. By the early 1950s, “who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb” is a Groucho Marx gag. Architectural critics dissed it as heavy, dry, hopelessly solemn, and cold. Neither it nor Grant inspired anyone anymore.

Since 1959, the National Park Service (NPS) has run the place. By the mid ’90s, NPS neglect was so bad the Grant family threatened to move the graves to Illinois or Ohio. This and embarrassing news coverage created a snap-to moment. Millions have been spent on renovations of the tomb and beautification of the park. The place looks good. Visitorship is around 100,000 a year, triple its low point.

The place is almost always quiet as a tomb, which, basically, is what it is. As a thought-provoking monument to the Civil War, both an agony and a launchpad, it’s too abstract. It’s a circuitous way to the teachable moments. Not having been connected to the war’s drama, as most were in 1897 when the tomb was finished, people today will find that the access points just aren’t there, unless you know a lot about Grant and have a sense for pathos.

Possibly Julia and the rest of the Grants chose poorly. She was a glamour queen, and New York was high style, but “a New York minute” is the operational phrase as well. Caressing the past isn’t second nature.

Grant had a stoic side, to be sure. Samuel Clemens, the mover and shaker behind his memoirs, compared him, as military historians go, to Julius Caesar, and many saw Grant, in his lifetime, as a paragon of virtue. Odd that he surrounded himself with crooks. Grant, the rough-and-ready soldier and bare-knuckles fighter, General Unconditional Surrender, also liked being around rich and powerful people. Liked it a lot. He tried to return to the White House in 1880. He once said he wanted nothing more than repose in a country graveyard, but he also said, “I know I belong to all of America.” Grant wasn’t a political dope.

He was canny. He knew the funeral would be, as one of his successors would say, “YUGE.” In life he might have belonged in New York, but New York doesn’t seem to accommodate the story Grant wanted to tell in death, which is about war, peace, and freedom. New York prizes money and status above all else. The timing might have been bad — U.S. military cemeteries like Arlington’s have taken wives for decades now — but Arlington seems like it would have made more sense as a site for Grant’s resting place. Riverside Park seem very isolated. The Columbia campus is in virtual lockdown because of the Hamasholes. Riverside Church, though open for services on Sundays, I presume, had locked front doors when I visited on a weekday. I went to the church office. “Only open for tours,” I was told. “What if I want to pray?” I asked. “Open only for TOURS.”

General Sherman’s equestrian monument by the entrance to Central Park premiered in 1903. Everyone sees it. It’s Sherman in glittering triumph, on the move, and he could stop by the Plaza for a slug on the way to conquer whatever. Now, that is a New York monument. And it’s dynamic enough for people to want to know all about Sherman.

The NPS visitor center is a short walk from Grant’s Tomb, down some steps toward the Hudson in what used to be the site’s public toilets. The 20-minute video is very, very good, focusing on Grant’s conciliatory approach to rebel soldiers, the 15th Amendment, which gave freed slaves the right to vote and was very much his baby, his tough take on the KKK, nearly obliterating it, his compassion for Native Americans, and his lionhearted death. Beautifully designed and succinct written interpretation concentrates on key events in his life, mostly using quotes from his memoirs and from generals who served with him.

A long border of deep concrete benches decorated with a rainbow’s palette of porcelain shard mosaics stretches along the north, east, and west sides of the tomb’s plaza. They were built between 1972 and 1974 and decorated by mosaicists, graffiti artists, hobbyist artists, students, and kids. Funky and folksy they depict animals and people, Grant included, and were then much decried by Grant’s family, history buffs, and architectural purists as unserious. Looking at them, I did spot a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, an ice-cream cone, an inverted elephant, and Donald Duck.

Was I appalled? No. They’re incongruous and would have been too bizarre for words in the 1890s, but the tomb is in a city, and city neighborhoods, by sheer accretion, grow more eclectic over time. The NPS sponsored the bench project as a 1970s “happening” in part to focus the locals on the tomb’s glories and to clean up the site.

Specifically, the benches are themselves memorials, built to mark the 100th anniversary of Grant’s designation of Yellowstone as America’s — and the world’s — first national park. Theodore Roosevelt gets the credit, but it was Grant who got our national park system going. When I visited, two specialists from CITYarts, a public-art nonprofit, and Tess Blum Art Mosaics Studio, were doing restoration work. We talked about mosaics — a sublime but neglected medium — and the benches’ debt to Gaudí, who did wonderful shard mosaics in Barcelona around the time Grant’s Tomb was built.

The benches add a bit of buoyancy to a somber, mysterious setting, which raises the issue of the effectiveness of Grant’s memorial. Today it seems like an architectural quirk, an archaism, a lonely place, and part of a pretty, tree-shaded park. A memorial, to be effective, is a two-way conversation between past and present. As much as I admire Grant, for many reasons that conversation isn’t happening at Grant’s Tomb.