Photo Credit: Mark Lentz. Viewpoint: Fifth Avenue and 70th Street, looking west; 12/29/01 3:57 PM.

Notes (Roving Rube): One of the Rube's tour guides found it typical that Manhattanites built this ornate memorial (designed by Daniel Chester French) for Richard Morris Hunt, America's first great architect, but it didn't stop them from tearing down most of what he built here, such as the magnificent Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue.

The goddess on the left represent the Beaux Arts ideal of incorporating the fine arts into Architecture, and the one on the right protectively cradles a surviving Hunt building.

The Municipal Arts Society did a good job of restoring this one recently, but it would be nice if the city could afford a dedicated person or two who would just go around to all our monuments with a broom, a mop and some Mr. Clean and make them look more tended-to.