David Bonomi used to walk his dog past the Christopher Columbus statue in Little Italy’s Arrigo Park every day. The 49-year-old, who for more than three decades has called the Near West Side neighborhood home, even named his local restaurant, Peanut Park Trattoria, after the park’s peanut-shaped trails.
But the space where the 133-year-old statue once stood has been empty for six years after 2020’s civil unrest led to its removal. And while a new Italian honoree, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, is on the way, Bonomi can’t help but feel a tinge of nostalgia.
“I want the Bears to stay in Soldier Field. … I want the Sox to stay in Bridgeport,” Bonomi said. “I hate losing Chicago.”
While the choice marks a resolution to a controversy marred by city politics, public debate and legal pushback, it’s a complicated outcome for some Little Italy residents and local Italian Americans.
Though Cabrini, an Italian immigrant who went on to become the first American canonized by the Catholic Church, is a welcome memorialization, there are those who still lament the loss of the Columbus monument — and are holding out hope that one day, it can return.
Chicago’s Columbus statues in Grant and Arrigo Park came down after activists forcibly attempted to remove the prominent statue in 2020, leading to violent clashes between police and protesters. Another was later removed in South Chicago.
Columbus has been condemned by activists around the country who point to the Italian explorer’s mistreatment of Indigenous people after he landed in the Americas in 1492. In recent years, especially, he’s been recognized as a primary example of Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, its resources and its native peoples.
But many Italian Americans prize statues of the explorer as an expression of their mainstream American identity.
The popular HBO series “The Sopranos,” about an Italian American mob boss, aired a scene on the topic in 2002. Tony Soprano’s son reads a school history book with his parents. “They would make fine servants,” he reads aloud. “That doesn’t sound like a slave trader to you?”
Tony Soprano (played by the late James Gandolfini) sits next to him. “So you finally read a book and it’s bull—-,” he says. “He discovered America is what he did, he was a brave Italian explorer. And in this house Columbus is a hero.”
Amid public debate about race in America in 2020, Columbus came under renewed scrutiny as statues across the U.S. were pulled down. By 2021, 130 cities across the country had replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.
Chicago’s Columbus monuments remained in storage after their removal while former Mayor Lori Lightfoot awaited an ambitious review for controversial city monuments in what she said would be “a racial healing and historical reckoning project.”
In 2022, the verdict was released. It recommended the statues remain gone and flagged others, including Mississippi River explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet and early Chicago settler John Kinzie for removal, for honoring white supremacy or disrespecting Indigenous peoples.
But the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, which represents over 60 Italian American organizations in Chicago, sued the Chicago Park District, claiming it broke a 1973 deal to display the Columbus statue in Arrigo Park. Created for and displayed in the Italian Pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Arrigo Park statue had stood at its location near Loomis Street since 1966.
“Christopher Columbus in 1893 became a symbol of hope for Italians in America. It’s like the Italian statue of liberty,” JCCIA President Ron Onesti recently told the Tribune following the decision to create a statue of Cabrini.
Nearly four years into the legal battle, the Park District announced last May that it had reached a deal with the JCCIA to end the lawsuit. Under the deal, the Park District agreed to loan the Arrigo Park statue to the committee for a planned Italian immigrant museum on Taylor Street. Meanwhile, the larger Grant Park statue’s base was cleared away.
As for Arrigo Park, city officials launched a public vote in January to pick another Italian honoree to replace Columbus, with candidates including physicist Enrico Fermi and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Cabrini won, with 1,500 of 3,900 total submissions. Sunday, March 1, is the deadline for artists to submit proposals for the design.
Best known as Mother Cabrini, the saint once walked among the people of Chicago. A daughter of Italian farmers — and one of 13 children in her family — she had dreams of serving as a missionary from a young age. She went on to start her own order in Italy, Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and in 1889 immigrated to America to expand her mission. She first went to New York, then to Chicago.
Cabrini’s ministry was relentless until her death at age 67. On her path to sainthood, she founded dozens of schools, orphanages, hospitals, convents and places of worship across the Americas. She dedicated her life to helping the sick, poor and less fortunate, and was a fearless advocate for Italian immigrants.
“Mother Cabrini really embodies what I call the soul of Chicago,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said last week.
Bittersweet
Since the new statue was announced, the reaction among the city’s Italian community has been “bittersweet,” Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans President Ron Onesti told the Tribune.
Nella Ferrara Davy, third-generation owner of Ferrara Bakery in Little Italy, also maintained in a written statement to the Tribune that the Columbus statue should be returned to its original location rather than kept behind closed doors.
“As most people in the community feel, the Columbus statue never should have been taken down,” she wrote. That said, Davy added that Cabrini is “extremely worthy of her own statue and should have one for all she has done and for her ties to the neighborhood.”
For nearly 90 years, Arrigo Park was next to the former St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Hospital, which Cabrini’s order purchased and built in 1910. The hospital closed in 1997 and was later converted into residences known as Columbus on the Park.
Davy said the Cabrini statue should be installed in addition to Columbus, not as a replacement.
Seeing Columbus back in Arrigo Park again would be ideal for Paul Basile, too. The longtime editor of Fra Noi, a Chicago-area magazine that focuses on the region’s Italian American community, said in an email that in the “best of all possible worlds,” the statue would be returned to its pedestal. But he added that he understood “why that would never happen within the confines of the Johnson administration.”
Given the current political climate, he said, having a statue of Cabrini at Arrigo and the Columbus statue in the pending Taylor Street museum is the “best possible outcome.”
Onesti and the JCCIA are heading the museum effort. The new facility will celebrate and study the history and contributions made by Italians and Italian Americans in Chicago, the committee said in a news release. The Columbus statue will be part of an exhibit dedicated to Arrigo Park and the monument’s presence in the 1893 World’s Fair. The museum is expected to be completed in the next four months, Onesti said.
Ultimately, Onesti said the committee wants Columbus back in Arrigo Park “at all costs.” Still, while the committee continues to fight, “having someone of the stature of Cabrini is a huge plus to the community,” Onesti said.
“For now, the Cabrini statue will go there,” he said. “I mean, rather than have somebody who wasn’t representing Italian heritage, well, of course, this is a much better solution for us.”
Neighborhood ties
For Bonomi, losing the Columbus statue is like “stripping the identity of the neighborhood,” he said.
Yet for all the buzz the statue’s caused, Bonomi — a father of two young children, who owns Coalfire and Peanut Park Trattoria restaurants on the North and West Side — said there’s “more important things to worry about.” And to him, whose grandfather came from Italy to Virginia before settling in Chicago, Cabrini’s replacement is a “good choice.”
For the old-timers in the neighborhood, though, whom Bonomi knows by name and often greets in his restaurant, “they 1000% want the statue back,” he said.
From a preservation standpoint, Peter Gordon wants to see a reinstallation because the statue felt like the landmark of the neighborhood, but the long-term Little Italy resident also recognized it’s a “fine line for sure to straddle.”
Gordon, who moved to the neighborhood when he was 6 years old, recalled passing by the statue every day on the way to grammar school. It’s where they used to hang out as kids, the 43-year-old said. When the statue was removed in the middle of the night six years ago, Gordon felt the community was unfairly treated.
“It’s akin to taking down the Buckingham Fountain … for this neighborhood,” he said. “Or, you know, the Tin Man in Oz Park.”
He was quick to note his fondness for the sculpture wasn’t an endorsement of Columbus and that there’s no better place to recognize Cabrini, whose story he loves and always been fascinated by. But the former statue was a point of local pride, he said, and losing it left a hole in the neighborhood.
Les Begay, a citizen of the Diné Nation (also known as the Navajo Nation), agrees that Cabrini is a good alternative, but the Rogers Park resident opposes seeing the Columbus statues returned. Begay, also founder of the Indigenous Peoples Day Coalition of Illinois, previously told the Tribune that not returning the Columbus statues “tells people that we still exist, that we are in Illinois, we’re across the country and we didn’t disappear in the 1800s.”
“We’ve been erased from history, so I think this is a step forward,” he said after it was recommended that statues be permanently removed.
In a call with the Tribune this week, Begay said he didn’t think last week’s announcement put an end to the yearslong issue. To him, though content with Cabrini, seeing new statues go up signifies the conversation continues, and he wants to ensure his and other Indigenous groups are part of that discussion.
He said he was surprised by how the new statue was chosen, noting he was not informed firsthand of the process, and added that he hopes going forward — if there is further engagement — that those who have been opposed to the Columbus statue from the get-go are still involved today.
“That’s all I’m asking,” he said.
Some Little Italy residents were glad Columbus was ousted from his home in Arrigo Park.
“I’m not super familiar with Cabrini, but anything that’s not Columbus is better, in my opinion,” said Aaron Kramer, a 21-year-old University of Illinois Chicago student who has lived in Little Italy for just over three years. “I’m not a Columbus guy,” said Kramer, who described Columbus as a colonizer and a “fascist.”
He wasn’t aware it would be replaced with Cabrini, but a quick Google search showing her as the patron saint of immigrants got him on board.
“I can get behind it,” he said.
Chicago Tribune’s Gregory Royal Pratt, A.D. Quig and Jake Sheridan and The Associated Press contributed.
