General Grant National Monument

General Grant National Monument

A landmark more than a destination for most New Yorkers, this Riverside Park memorial to distinguished general and less-distinguished president Ulysses. S. Grant is thought to be the largest mausoleum in the United States, a granite and marble fortress modeled on 'the original mausoleum,' the tomb of Mausolus and one of the original seven wonders of the world. The tomb brings together two impulses altogether alien to contemporary New Yorkers--adulation for Grant, whose popularity at the time of his death rivaled Lincoln's, and whose funeral was attended by a miraculous million well-wishers, and the nineteenth century zeal, fueled by Gilded Age profits and American cultural ambition, for monument-building. The building itself is spectacular, fitted with thrilling mosaics and somewhat more prosaic murals, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century seems, more than a tribute to a single man, a memorial to the lost faith in the ability of Great Men to shape the world.