Five years after it was splattered with red paint, toppled and dragged into a lake, the bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that stood for nearly a century in a city park in Richmond, Virginia, has been fished out, restored and given a new home. It now gazes out at a bocce ball court outside a Sons of Italy lodge some 300 miles away in Blauvelt, New York.

Boston’s marble Columbus statue was beheaded in 2020 — its second decapitation. Repaired and given to the Knights of Columbus, it was moved to the garden of a nearby church, where it now stands among religious statues.

And in Baltimore, where protesters pulled down a Columbus statue in 2020 and dumped it into the Inner Harbor, the broken pieces have been retrieved and used to guide the creation of a replica.

The culture war over Colu

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