With Robert E. Lee's statue plucked Friday from its pedestal in Lee Circle, details are emerging about what will replace it and the other three Confederate monuments that have come down in New Orleans during the past few weeks.ย
First, the 68-foot column that Lee has been standing atop for the past 133 years is going to remain, according to Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration. Some type of water feature and a selection of public art will be added at Lee Circle. Plans also have been announced for the other sites that have lost monuments.
In the meantime, the Mayor's Office hopes to find a nonprofit or government agency willing to house the four removed monuments in some type of exhibit that would place them in historical context. But whoever takes the monuments will have to agree that they will not be displayed outdoors in Orleans Parish.ย
The statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis that was removed last week from its site at Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkwayย will be replaced by an American flag, Landrieu's office said.
City Park officials will take the lead in determining what should replace the equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard that was removed earlier this week from a traffic circle at the main entrance to the park.
The most recent site of the monument to the so-called Battle of Liberty Place, a white supremacist uprising against the state's Reconstruction-era government, will be left vacant. That site, on Iberville Street behind the parking garage at Canal Place, is largely out of public sight. The marker had stood on Canal Street until it was moved in the 1990s.
It is not clear whether the administration will attempt to rename Jefferson Davis Parkway, Robert E. Lee Boulevard or Lee Circle, whose name technically refers only to the center of the St. Charles Avenue traffic circle and not to the street itself, though that land may also be renamed.
The city said it expects to seek proposals from nonprofits or government agencies interested in taking the monuments to Lee, Davis and the Battle of Liberty Place.
The Beauregard statue is not included in that list at this point because the city will be talking with City Park officials about the ownership of that statue and the land on which it stood for 102 years. In a court case earlier this month, city officials were dismissive of the idea that City Park owns the land or the statue, but more recently they have acknowledged some uncertainly on that point.ย
Those interested in taking the statues will be able to submit proposals for each of them individually or for the whole group, according to a city news release. But the proposals must "state how they will place the statues in context, both in terms of why they were first erected and why the city chose in 2015 to remove them."
The City Council will have the final say over which proposals are accepted.
It is unclear whether the city's bid process will involve a sale of the statues, a free loan to the chosen institutions or some other arrangement.
The Landrieu administration has previously taken a hard line against donating city property, including a recent attempt to require property owners to pay to lease the space under their balconies, stoops or other property features that impinge on public sidewalks.
In the meantime, the monuments will be crated and stored in a city facility, according to the city's statement Thursday night. That appears to be in response to criticism Wednesday, when the Beauregard statue and pieces of the Davis statue were spotted outdoors in a storage yard.
One possible destination for the monuments is a state park or historic site.
Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser reached out to Landrieu last week, asking that the city work with his office, which oversees the state Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, to โfind a location in ถถา๕h befitting (the statues), which people interested in history and culture can view and decide for themselves their history and meaning.โย
Nungesser spokesman Buddy Boe said the lieutenant governor, who opposed the removal of the monuments, wants the statues to be preserved by the state.
โOur overall mission is historic preservation, historic site management, promoting the culture of ถถา๕h and its history regardless of how unique and colorful that history might be,โ he said.
The director of the Beauvoir estate in Biloxi, Mississippi, where Jefferson Davis lived after the Civil War, has said it would be interested in displaying at least the Davis statue.
Officials at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where Robert E. Lee was president for five years after the war, have said they would not be interested in taking the Lee statue.