New York City and the Humiliation of Error

When we travelled to NYC last week for a few days of fun and frolic, I decided to hunt down more info on William Pitt's demise and go to Bowling Green Park on the south end of the island to see what was left of the very fence that surrounded his fallen majesty.

So I cross-towned it from our hotel to the East Side and began to prowl the Museum of the City of New York. Though I'd been told the statue had been moved to the 4th floor, there was no public access to that floor. I started asking around about it. Deja vu. No one knew a thing about no William Pitt, and especially not about his damaged statue. The head of paintings and sculptures asked me, "Are you sure his name was William Pitt? Maybe it ws something else." "Of course it was William Pitt. As in one of the great champions of the American Revolution." (What, exactly, do they teach in grad schools these days???)

After a farily long conversation, she was able to locate the offending hunk of marble. It was, it seems, in the New York Historical Society. Not the Museum of the City of New York. My face, of course, was red. But I did manage to spread a little pearl of wisdom on the Upper East Side that day. I corrected the info in the chapter the moment I logged on to my Dell at home.

Then it was a rockin', reelin', roarin' ride and I ended up on the downtown side (as an old Dylan song used to say). It took only moments to orient myself and I was soon shooting pix of the ancient fence. The city had even placed an informative plaque about the George III (see above) at the entrance to the park. Something, at last, was as it should be. If it weren't beginning to snow, and if I hadn't had 2 movies to catch over in the Village, I might have seen if I could hunt down the site of the former Museum hotel that had sheltered the beleaguered Pitt for so many years.