This is my civic sculpture spirit animal. He lives outside of the New York City Public Library with another lion and is named either Patience or Fortitude. I’m leaning toward Fortitude.
The library website has a page about the lions here. The New York Times City Room blog has a piece about the lions turning 100 years old here:
“They are familiar in the way that the clock at the Biltmore once was. That may be why some New Yorkers assume they were loved from the moment they took their places, Patience on the downtown side of the wide front steps, Fortitude on the uptown side.
Except that they weren’t loved in the beginning. When they were still new arrivals, passers-by complained that they were ‘squash-faced’ and ‘mealy-mouthed and complacent.'”
Seems crazy to me that people wouldn’t find the lines, scale and scope of these pieces anything but fantastic.
