The historical monuments in Piedmont Park may seem like they’ve been there forever, but one of them—a simple pillar with a bust set into it—only reappeared in the park around this time last year. It’s the bust of poet and composer Sidney Lanier and it was reinstated near the 14th Street entrance to the park, where the statue stood since 1914 before being vandalized a number of time and eventually, disappearing entirely.
We spoke to two of the men responsible for the restoration: Boyd Coons, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Preservation Center and Richard Guy Wilson, commonwealth professor in architectural history at the University of Virginia and longtime Sidney Lanier scholar. Coons began the conversation by talking about how a statue of a Macon-born poet who is buried in Baltimore came to be erected in Atlanta in the first place.
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