The latest round in the three-year court battle over the Christopher Columbus statue in Schenley Park was fought Wednesday in Commonwealth Court.
An Italian-American group wants the court to overturn last year’s lower-court ruling permitting removal of the towering statue, which sits just off Schenley Drive, near Phipps Conservatory and the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
George Bochetto, an attorney for the Pittsburgh-based Italian Sons and Daughters of America, told the seven Commonwealth Court judges that the 1955 city ordinance that enabled the siting of the monument requires the city to maintain it in perpetuity.
Speaking in the court’s chambers Downtown, Bochetto reiterated arguments previously lodged in the ISDA’s 2020 lawsuit challenging the decision that year by the city’s art commission and former Mayor Bill Peduto to unseat the statue.
In October 2022, after attempting unsuccessfully to mediate the dispute, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge John T. McVay dismissed the suit, paving the way for the statue’s removal. But the ISDA appealed, and the monument remains standing, if shrouded in the plastic tarp city workers applied in late 2020.
Critics of the statue want it gone because Columbus enslaved and mistreated indigenous people. Many cities have removed their Columbus statues in recent years. But the Genoese explorer’s relative merits were set aside Wednesday largely in favor of procedural issues.
Judge Ellen Ceisler questioned whether the ISDA even has standing to bring the suit. The statue was commissioned by the Sons of Columbus of America, the group named in the 1955 ordinance. Bochetto said that when that group dissolved, it made the ISDA its “successor organization.”
When Ceisler characterized that agreement as “a handshake,” Bochetto acknowledged, “There was no formal-type succession contract or agreement.” But he said oral contracts are binding in Pennsylvania.
McVay’s 2022 ruling tossing out the ISDA’s suit leaned on the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court case Pleasant Grove v. Summum, in which the Court held that privately funded monuments in public parks represent protected government speech. That ruling gave the city “free rein” to remove the Columbus statue regardless of the city’s “long-ago … ordinance process,” McVay wrote.
While Bochetto argued that the ordinance remained binding, associate city solicitor Julie Koren told the court it is more accurate to regard the ordinance as “a resolution.”
“There’s nothing in the ordinance that requires the city to display this forever,” Koren said. “It is a resolution memorializing a gift.”
She added that the city charter gives the mayor power over city assets like public art.
In fact, in 2020, Peduto and the art commission — all of them his appointees — clashed over whether it was the mayor or the commission who had final say on public art. The will of council, which approves mayoral nominees to city commissions, was not part of the discussion.
However, on Wednesday, Commonwealth Court Judge Michael H. Wojcik wondered aloud whether council might be the best place to resolve the dispute after all.
If council were to vote to either repeal the ordinance or remove the statue, he asked Bochetto, “Would we be here [in court]?”
Bochetto answered, “Probably not."
