Art: Lady Higher Up

When heavy-jowled Stanford White, one of the country's most talented architects, was commissioned to design the original Madison Square Garden, an arena in New York to house circuses, horse shows, prize fights, dog shows, a beer garden and cabaret, he found it suitable to clap a copy of Seville's Giraldo Tower on one side and then get his good friend Augustus St. Gaudens to set a 13-ft. nude Greek goddess tiptoe on the Moorish-Gothic-Renaissance cathedral belfry. Beyond its inappropriateness, the Garden tower was a lovely thing and New York cherished her Diana. For almost 40 years newspaper poets, after-dinner speakers, prize fighters, cab drivers, club members waxed sentimental about her. William Sydney ("O. Henry") Porter wrote one of his best known stories, "The Lady Higher Up," about her, and Architect Stanford White was shot dead at her feet.

In 1925 they put a rope round her neck and hauled her down to make room for the New York Life Insurance Building, while a group of mourners including Elder Statesman Elihu Root and the late George L. ("Tex") Rickard stood bareheaded in the rain. Sentimentalists were comforted by an announcement from the insurance company that Diana would not leave New York. She would be presented to New York University as soon as $65,000 was raised to build a proper tower for her to stand on. That was seven years ago. Elder Statesman Root took charge of the building fund, Diana retired to a Brooklyn warehouse. New Yorkers lost interest. Last week New York was surprised to learn that Diana was lost to them. While the N. Y. U. building fund languished, acquisitive Director Fiske Kimball of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, cash in hand, had won the New York Life's permission to take the lady to Philadelphia, set her up on a tower in Fairmount Park. At least one Philadelphian was not ready to welcome the "Lady Higher Up." Rev. Mary Hubbert Ellis, pastor of the Primitive Methodist Church, had heard that the Lady was nude. "We are going to have a meeting next Wednesday," said Primitive Methodist Ellis, "to take up complaints about obscene books, nude pictures and also this Diana statue. We are going after the whole situation and we mean business. . . . Of course to do the right thing we ought to go into the Academy and the Museum and clean them out, too. They are just as bad as the burlesque theatres for nude pictures, but if we can't do that we can certainly do something to stop their putting such things around in the open."