a.k.a. V.J.

During a 2016 trip to Germany, my son Grant and I were walking through Frankfurt am Main. We happened across a statue of the great 18th-century polymath Friedrich Schiller. I took a picture and remarked to Grant that one really doesn’t see statues of poets or philosophers in the U.S.

It turns out I was wrong about that, and laughably so. Not only has there been a big statue of a poet and philosopher right under my nose in Syracuse my whole life, but that statue is actually of Friedrich Schiller standing alongside fellow titan of German literature Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I didn’t know about this statue until very recently, despite the fact that I have worked in and around Syracuse through most of my career, on top of having been a university student there. (One tepid point in my defense: it’s in a part of town I never have occasion to visit.)

The Goethe-Schiller Monument is located in Schiller Park on Syracuse’s Northside. I’ve known about the park for a long time, but not the monument. I also never realized that Schiller Park was named after the Schiller. The Northside was once the main enclave of German immigrants in Syracuse. The demographics of the neighborhood have shifted many times over since that was the case, but the area’s German roots can still be seen in some of the street names around the park: Grumbach, Hier, Eisner, and Merz, to name a few.

The park is a short drive from my workplace, so I went on my lunchbreak and grabbed a few shots.