BOSTON — Six years ago today, the City of Boston caved to a woke mob and yanked its Christopher Columbus statue out of the North End waterfront — after rioters during the George Floyd protests doused the 41-year-old marble figure in red paint and then beheaded it overnight.
Six years later, no Christopher Columbus statue stands on the North End waterfront where one had been since 1979.
The Christopher Columbus statue at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, doused in red paint by protesters during the George Floyd protests on the morning of June 10, 2020 — hours before being beheaded.
The marble Columbus had stood at the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park since Columbus Day 1979. It was Carrara marble, imported from Italy. It was commissioned by Italian-American building contractor Arthur Stivaletta.
Stivaletta's name is carved into the pedestal as chairman of the "Friends of Christopher Columbus Committee" — alongside the Knights of Columbus Ausonia Council #1513, the Order Sons of Italy in America, the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, and a long list of other North End Italian-American organizations whose money put the statue there.
It was the second time the statue had lost its head. It had been decapitated once before, in June 2006 — the head was recovered in the North End that time. It had been spray-painted "murderer" in the early 2000s, drenched in red paint in 2004 and 2006, and tagged with "Black Lives Matter" red paint in 2015.
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But June 2020 was different. The 2020 beheading happened on the night of Tuesday, June 9 — and then-Mayor Marty Walsh didn't put it back. He pulled it.
By Wednesday, Walsh had announced the statue would be hauled away. He told reporters the city would "take time to assess the historic meaning of the statue," per WBUR. The actual removal happened the next day — Thursday, June 11, 2020 — and the pedestal at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park has stood empty ever since.
The headless figure on the pedestal at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park the morning after the beheading. The city removed the statue the next day.
Where it is now
In October 2020, Walsh announced where Columbus would go: an affordable-housing development at 41 North Margin Street being built by the Knights of Columbus Ausonia Council — the same North End Italian-American fraternal organization whose name is carved into the original pedestal.
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The figure spent more than two years in city storage and restoration.
On Tuesday, May 16, 2023, the cleaned-up Columbus statue went back on public display for the first time — at the Ausonia Council property on North Margin Street. It was always meant to be a temporary stop.
By late August 2024, the Knights had moved the statue to its permanent home: the Peace Garden at Saint Leonard Church, 320 Hanover Street in the North End. The relocation was announced August 30, 2024 by the Italian American Alliance, which called it "a permanent and safe home in the North End, where it is proudly and publicly displayed." The parish has since held a Columbus Day blessing of the restored figure at the Peace Garden.
That is where the marble Columbus stands today — six years after Boston yanked it off its waterfront pedestal, restored and reinstalled by the same Italian-American community whose money had put it up in 1979.
The City has said it will eventually commission a replacement piece for the original waterfront pedestal — a sculpture "highlighting the Italian immigrants of the North End." No date has been announced.
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