LITTLE ITALY — After a contentious five-year saga following its removal from Arrigo Park, Little Italy’s Christopher Columbus statue could soon be on display at a new Italian-American museum opening this fall on Taylor Street.
Ron Onesti, president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, has been in talks to create the Florence Scala Italian American Museum, 1501 W. Taylor St., since 2024 and is eyeing a Columbus Day opening date on Oct. 12. The Columbus statue will be placed on a concrete platform built into the floor as the museum’s centerpiece to honor the contributions of Italian-Americans to Chicago, Onesti said.
“This is something very special to us,” he said Thursday as Taylor Street Little Italy Festa, which runs through Sunday, got underway. “We’re only expecting the same respect and sensitivity to something that’s important to us as anyone else would with their culture. [The Columbus statue] really has nothing to do with what what this guy who lived 600 years ago really did, what he conquered or what he found. What it’s become is an icon of faith and hope for our ethnic group.”
Crews remove the Christopher Columbus statue from its pedestal the morning of July 24, 2020. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
City officials in July 2020 removed Columbus statues from Grant Park, Arrigo Park and South Chicago’s Drake Fountain after the monuments attracted protests, vandalism and calls for their removal from critics highlighting Columbus’s legacy of colonial violence. Onesti’s committee filed a lawsuit over the Arrigo Park statue removal the following year, sparking several years of negotiations with the Chicago Park District over the future of the statue.
Last year, the Arrigo Park statue was given to the committee as a part of a settlement to build a replacement statue dedicated to Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. As part of the deal, Onesti pledged to display the Arrigo Park statue inside the museum.
“Once the statue came down, I started asking questions about who actually owns it,” Onesti said. “I found out we had a contract with the city of Chicago that the statue could not be altered, or altered in any way, without the express written consent of us because we actually paid for the statue in the ’60s. … So we eventually came to this deal, and they told us it had to be indoors, but we wanted to keep it in the neighborhood, because that’s important to us.”
Onesti found the vacant property on Taylor Street in 2024 and has been involved in structural renovations to the building ever since. He initially hoped for an August opening to coincide with the Taylor Street Festival, which his company runs, but couldn’t finish renovations in time.
The museum’s exterior paint job was mostly finished by Thursday ahead of the street festival, Onesti said. The building’s brick facade is painted white and adorned with red-and-green lettering reading “Florence Scala Chicago Italian American Museum” and “Chicago’s Historic Little Italy” over the front entrance.
The interior, currently being used for storage for the festival, is a single room replete with exposed brick and wood flooring. With structural renovations complete, Onesti said most of the remaining work left to do — which he expects to be completed in about four weeks — is cosmetic.
Chicago police guard a statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park, after demonstrators spray painted it and tried to pull it down during a protest in support of Black and Indigenous people on July 17, 2020. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
Due to the size of the statue, Onesti is planning on creating a large hole in the ceiling to lower it onto the center platform, he said.
“So we thought, ‘How can you get the statue in here?’ It’s 4,500 pounds,” he said. “You can’t just wheel it in because of the floors. So what we’re doing is we’re putting a hole in the roof. We’re gonna have to crane it down.”
The statue is currently being cleaned inside of a Park District warehouse, according to Onesti. A spokesperson for the Park District did not respond to a request for comment from Block Club.
The museum will include a chronological history of Italians in Chicago, beginning in the 1600s when Italian-born Henri de Tonti moved through the area with the French military. The majority of the exhibit will be dedicated to the history of Italian immigration from 1880-1970, highlighting the struggles, culinary contributions and upward mobility of the community in Chicago.
The museum is named after Scala, who fought to protect immigrants threatened by hostile development and policing tactics on the Near West Side that threatened the cultural fabric of her community. Scala was the target of a bombing attack in 1962.
Though many have pushed for years to remove such statutes and symbolism throughout the U.S., that activism gained renewed momentum during the 2020 national demonstrations against police violence and systemic racism after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd.
Columbus — who was born in Genoa, Italy, and whose explorations were sponsored by the Spanish monarchy — has long been touted as the man who “discovered” America. That distinction has made him a hero among many Italian Americans.
Many historians have noted Native Americans populated the area before Columbus arrived, and his actions led to mass genocide, rape and torture of Indigenous people, for whom the holiday was re-dedicated.
Columbus Day was established in 1892 to recognize the heritage and history of Italian Americans after battling fierce discrimination across the United States. The holiday was made official in response to the lynching of 11 Italian Americans at the hands of a mob in 1891 in New Orleans.
Columbus soon after became a figurehead for the growing immigrant population.
“Can you imagine if we went around if someone said, ‘You know what, I don’t like Martin Luther King,’” Onesti said. “But apparently, for us, people say, ‘No, we don’t like it, we don’t believe in it, so now we’re gonna tear it down.’ Since when do we allow things just to be torn down if there’s differences of opinion?”