Columbus statue Baltimore dumped has found a pedestal in Trump’s Washington

A controversial Baltimore statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus ripped from its Inner Harbor-area pedestal nearly six years ago has discovered a new home next door to the White House.

The marble-and-resin rendition of the 15th century explorer traditionally credited with discovering America was installed overnight in a plaza outside the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building on 17th Street NW, according to artist Tilghman Hemsley IV.

Hemsley said the finishing touches were put on the installation around 2:30 a.m. Sunday.

“Christopher Columbus has landed again,” he said.

The move marks another stop in the statue’s complicated political history, dating to the mid-1980s.

The statue’s owners, the Italian American Organizations United, said they have agreed to loan the marble statue to the Trump administration and have signed an agreement with the National Park Service.

The group’s president, John Pica, called the installation a victory.

“In a sense, it’s an achievement after going through a very difficult and trying process,” Pica said.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said the statue’s place on White House grounds is “well deserved” and that President Donald Trump has “rightly hailed Christopher Columbus as ‘the original American hero.’”

Protesters in Baltimore toppled the statue on July 4, 2020, one of many public demonstrations of the country’s racial reckoning after the killing by police of Minneapolis man George Floyd.

Before the statue’s removal from its site in Little Italy, Pica said, he had hired a security guard to watch over Colombus. But it wasn’t enough.

A crowd overwhelmed the security guard and pulled the statue from its pedestal, dragging it along the ground to the nearby water, leaving a trail of white rubble.

A few days later, the group’s leaders came up with a plan to rescue the dethroned Columbus. They brought a crane and hired divers to fish the statue out of the Inner Harbor and transported the broken statue to the care of Hemsley, the Eastern Shore artist. They raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for its restoration.

In order to get grant money to pay Hemsley, the group needed to formally request the city rescind its ownership.

“They just gave it to us,” Pica said.

Pica and other Italian American leaders decades before hired a sculptor in Italy to carve Columbus in Carrara marble and gifted the statue to the city in exchange for maintenance. President Ronald Reagan and then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer attended the statue’s unveiling in 1984 in Columbus Plaza.

Members of the association, according to Pica, are ecstatic it has a new home. To them, the statue symbolizes a connection to Italy and a piece of Baltimore history.

They dismissed the explorer’s controversial role in the colonization of the Americas. Critics call his arrival catastrophic for the land’s native people, ushering in an era of violent exploitation, enslavement of Indigenous populations and devastating diseases. The issue saw dozens of Columbus statues across the U.S. removed amid a national reckoning over public monuments in 2020.

Hemsley finished the repaired figure several years ago. He and his son Will Hemsley used the recovered pieces to form molds, creating a replica with marble and resin. But the Italian American Organizations were hesitant to bring the statue back to Baltimore.

Hemsley said in its new location the statue is protected by security. A plaque memorializes the monument’s journey to D.C. and explains how it was once rescued from the bottom of the Inner Harbor and restored.

Just last week, Hemsley received word the administration was interested in giving it a public home after years of seclusion in his Eastern Shore warehouse.

The Trump administration’s interest comes after the president honored Columbus with a proclamation, calling him “the original American hero.”

“Some people are gonna like it. Some people are gonna hate it,” Hemsley said. “That’s the life we lead right now.”

Banner reporter Clara Longo de Freitas contributed to this article.

This article has been updated.