The Obelisk — Attraction in New York

Probably the strangest monument in Central Park is the 71 foot, 244 ton Obelisk, or Cleopatra’s Needle. Easily the oldest man made object in the park it is located in what is now a secluded bower directly behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The obelisk was erected in Heliopolis around 1500 BC and was moved to Alexandria around 12 B.C. by Rome’s Augustus Caesar. By then, the lower corners of the stones had been broken off, so the Romans had bronze supports in the form of sea crabs placed under them. (Two of the original crabs are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the other two were stolen in Egypt.) There it remained until 1879 when it was shipped to the United States. This was either as a gift of the Khedive of Egypt, who offered it to the U. S. as a token of good faith to help stimulate economic relations between the two countries. Or it was swiped by William H. Vanderbilt against the wishes of the Egyptians. It depends on who you ask.

Even more unlikely than the actual presence of the monument in Central Park is the monumental moving job undertaken to get it here. Stand at the bottom and look up and imagine taking it down, putting it in a ship in 1879, sailing across the ocean and up the Hudson and than moving across town, (The cross town journey alone took more than 4 months!), and then setting it upright again on Greywacke Knoll, its present site. The installation was completed in 1881. This Herculean feat was accomplished by a U.S. Navy engineer, Lieutenant-Commander Henry...

Cleopatra's Needle, found in Central Park, Manhattan is one of three Ancient Egyptian obelisks re-erected in London, Paris, and New York City during the nineteenth century. The obelisks in London and New York are a pair, and the one in Paris is also part of a pair originally from a different site in Luxor, where its twin remains. Although all three needles are genuine Ancient Egyptian obelisks, their shared popular nickname (Cleopatra's Needle) is a misnomer, as they have no connection with the Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, and were already over a thousand years old in her lifetime. The New York needle, as with the London needle, was originally made during the reign of 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III. The Paris needle dates to the reign of 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II and was the first to be moved and re-erected. The New York needle was the first to acquire the French nickname, "L'aiguille de Cléopâtre" when it stood in Alexandria.

The New York City needle was erected in Central Park (at 40°46′46.67″N 73°57′55.44″W, just west of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) on 22 February 1881. It was secured in May 1877 by judge Elbert E. Farman, the then-United States Consul General at Cairo, as a gift from the Khedive for the United States remaining a friendly neutral as the European powers – France and Britain – maneuvered to secure political control of the...

The Obelisk of New York, located in Central Park, the largest in Manhattan in New York City, USA, weighs 244 tons of granite stone.

After the opening of the Suez Canal in the year 1869 AD. It was mentioned that Khedive Ismail wanted to donate an Egyptian obelisk to the United States of America to strengthen mutual commercial relations, but it was officially granted with a letter signed in 1879 AD. By his son, Khedive Tawfiq, and after being transported in a private ship across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, it took about four months to transport it from the bank of the Hudson River to Staton Island and then to its current location.

The obelisks of London and New York contain inscriptions in the name of Thutmose III, Pharaoh of Egypt in the fourteenth century BC, and signs added by Ramses II in the twelfth century BC. During the reign of the Romans in Egypt, they moved the obelisks in the tenth century BC from the Temple of Ra in Heliopolis to Alexandria to decorate a palace there. It is not known precisely why the name of the obelisks was attributed to Queen Cleopatra, but it is believed that the name came in the Roman era as a result of Cleopatra's political activity evident in Roman politics...