Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [2]
In Galena, having retired—as a captain, under a cloud—from the army in 1854, Grant had nursed a drinking problem that was the talk of the town, and was reduced to working as a clerk in his father’s harness shop—a humiliation he felt keenly. Galena would not therefore have recommended itself to the Grants as the place to bury the most admired American general since Washington, and perhaps the greatest American of the nineteenth century.
Although Grant had been miserable at West Point, which he had never wanted to attend in the first place, he was tempted to choose it as the location for his tomb, but typically gave up on the idea when he realized that Mrs. Grant could not be buried beside him there. He had never been happy when separated from her for any length of time—hence the occasional drinking bouts—and he was not about to be buried without providing a place for her by his side.
Grant was always a sucker for other people’s financial schemes, so it is hardly surprising that he was easily persuaded of the merits of the Upper West Side of New York, which was being touted in the late nineteenth century as the coming fashionable neighborhood of the city. Real estate developers pointed to the heights overlooking the Hudson River as the natural place for all that was wealthy and glamorous in New York Society to live, and indeed, for a time it seemed as if they were right, and that the Upper West Side would be New York’s equivalent of Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, with the added advantage of a stunning river view. The site above the Hudson in Riverside Park, at Riverside Drive and West 122nd Street, must have seemed like the ideal place for a mausoleum that was intended to rival Napoleon’s, and which to this day remains the second largest in the Western world (the Garfield Memorial—oddly enough, considering that President Garfield’s reputation is far more diminished than Grant’s—is the largest).*
The “General Grant National Memorial,”2 as it is officially known, would be built with donations from more than ninety thousand of his grateful fellow citizens, for a total of six hundred thousand dollars, the most money that had ever been raised for a public monument at the time, and more than a million people gathered to see his body conveyed there, in a procession that stretched for more than seven miles, contained sixty thousand marchers, and included President Grover Cleveland, two ex-presidents, the justices of the United States Supreme Court and countless generals, including former Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and Simon Bolivar Buckner. No “lascivious choreography” was on display, needless to say.
The Grants can be forgiven for not being able to foresee the failure of the Upper West Side to deliver on its promise—after all, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was far shrewder, made the same mistake when he put Riverside Church there, as did William Randolph Hearst when he built an enormous penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson—but there is a certain irony to the fact that but for their own resistance to the idea, Grant’s Tomb could have been in Washington, D.C., close by the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
There, because of its high visibility, Grant’s giant memorial, with its orderly rows of Doric columns, would no doubt have been lovingly preserved, pristine and gleaming, by the U.S. National Park Service, and lines of schoolchildren and tourists would be waiting to visit it even today. Instead it overlooks the West Side Highway, has been incongruously surrounded by a bright red serpentine wall—a hideous “community project”—and stands right smack in the middle of a neighborhood many New Yorkers still avoid as much as possible, given its reputation for drug dealing, gang warfare, racial tension, and muggings.
In memorials, as in every other aspect of real estate, location is everything, and the Grants were as unlucky in their choice of real estate as they were in