A Tribute to a ‘French Founding Father’

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

By James Barron

Two hundred years ago this weekend, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited New York — the first stop on a tour that would take him all over the still-young nation — his three-masted packet ship docked first on Staten Island. Lafayette sailed on to Manhattan the next morning.

Today and tomorrow, when a re-enactor follows Lafayette’s itinerary, he will go by water taxi.

There will be a 13-gun salute, as there was 200 years ago. And there will be a procession to City Hall, as there was when some 80,000 people — roughly half of the city’s population at the time — filled the streets to see the “French founding father,” as some Americans called him.

He rode in a horse-drawn carriage. This time around, the carriage will be motorized.

But the organizers of the 200th-anniversary recreation of Lafayette’s trip plan to party like it’s 1824, with costumes and ceremonies commemorating his 6,000-mile tour across 24 states. Even though Lafayette was an old soldier by then — he was 66 when he arrived in New York — his fame had not faded away. He was still revered for fighting in his 20s with George Washington and for helping to force Lord Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

Mark Schneider, who will portray Lafayette, will board the water taxi on Staten Island. He knows the role: He has played Lafayette at Colonial Williamsburg for 25 years, so long that his friends call him “Marquis Mark.”

Some real Lafayettes will be on hand for the weekend’s ceremonies, too: Virginie Bureaux de Pusy-Dumottier de Lafayette, the marquis’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, and two of her six children, Héloïse, 22, and Adélaïde, 20, Barbier-Dumottier de Lafayette.

De Pusy-Dumottier de Lafayette, who is 60, said she marveled at “how young, yet how mature” her ancestor was when he sailed to America. He was 19, a rich aristocrat who paid his own way, hoping to fulfill ambitions of military greatness. He spent time with Washington at Valley Forge during the trying, miserable winter of 1777-78. By then he had been given command of a division of troops.

Two years later he would be the one to tell Washington that France was sending ships and 5,000 troops that would prove essential to the colonists’ defeat of the redcoats.

The 13-gun salute, as the water taxi crosses New York Harbor, will come from Fort Hamilton — not, as in 1824, from a fort named for Lafayette. That installation was torn down in 1960 during the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

After the water taxi docks at Brookfield Place, the office-and-shopping complex in Lower Manhattan, Schneider will conduct a ceremonial review of troops before going to Evacuation Day Plaza, at Broadway and Whitehall Street, for a flag-raising ceremony. The plaza is named for the day in 1783 when the last British garrison left the city, and Washington marched in.

The Lafayette procession will move on to City Hall for speeches, recreating a cavalcade that some Lafayette fans consider a precursor of the ticker-tape parade. “From all the windows flowers and wreaths showered upon the general,” Lafayette’s secretary, Auguste Levasseur, wrote of the 1824 event. A huge banner at City Hall welcomed “the nation’s guest,” a title that had been conferred by President James Monroe.

On Saturday morning Schneider and Lafayette’s descendants will pose in front of Castle Clinton.

De Pusy-Dumottier de Lafayette, who called the weekend “a rendezvous with history,” described another rendezvous with history she had on her way to New York. She went first to Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, near Alexandria, Va. She was so moved, she began crying.

Another visitor noticed and asked, “Are you a relative of Washington?”

Someone who was with De Pusy-Dumottier de Lafayette said, “No, she’s a Lafayette descendant.”

The other visitor said, “I am a descendant of James Armistead.”

James Armistead was an enslaved man who was a spy for Lafayette, serving as a double agent: The British believed that Armistead was a runaway slave who was spying on the colonists. Armistead infiltrated Cornwallis’s headquarters, and Cornwallis himself ordered Armistead to spy on Lafayette. Intelligence from Armistead enabled Washington and the French to organize a blockade against British reinforcements before the battle at Yorktown and Cornwallis’s surrender.

Lafayette campaigned for Armistead to be freed after the war, and when he was, he took Lafayette as his surname.

Weekend Weather

Friday and Saturday will be sunny, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms from Saturday night through Sunday night. Temperatures will reach the high 80s on Friday and remain in the low 80s through the weekend, dropping to the low 70s at night.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Sept. 2 (Labor Day).

What Else to Do This Weekend

• “SWEAT!” indoors: On Friday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s perspiration-themed film series begins.

• Outdoor jazz: The Inwood Jazz Festival returns on Sunday at 10 a.m.,

• Art and psychiatry: Catch the last weekend of the exhibition “Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut” exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.

• Bryant Park shows: Watch a lineup of performances from The Jalopy Theater and School of Music on Saturday at 7 p.m. in Manhattan.

For more events in New York, here’s a list of what to do this month.

A showcase for new music

In classical music, August is a time for performances in far-off destinations.

But the Time Spans festival does not go anywhere. At the DiMenna Center in Hell’s Kitchen, it is a modern and contemporary-music event that the Times critic Seth Colter Walls wrote last year was the equal of anything on the international circuit.

This weekend, the Montreal-based Bozzini Quartet will perform two programs that bring the work of Jürg Frey and Klaus Lang to the United States, including Frey’s String Quartet No. 4, 2018-22. On Sunday, the Talea Ensemble will perform the U.S. premiere of Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s Piano Concerto “Sinfonietta Version.”

Walls wrote last year that the Time Spans festival’s popularity is a sign that audiences are catching on to a broader effort to make classical music more approachable, with concerts lasting an hour to 90 minutes, with no intermission; no dress codes; and no complicated advance planning required. (Crucially, he writes, “the festival does that assuming that new audiences can handle new music.”)

METROPOLITAN diary

Free sandwich

Dear Diary:

It was 1985, and I was on my first trip to New York. I had driven up from Knoxville, Tenn., with a boy who didn’t like to drive. He was chasing a boy in the city, and I wanted to see the city.

After we arrived, he went his way, and I went mine. I stayed with some actor friends but spent most days alone with a tiny bit of money, trying to soak up everything.

Walking past a deli one day, I saw a sign scrawled on butcher paper: “Free sandwich if you can name Meryl Streep’s first movie.”

I walked inside and approached the man at the counter.

“I know the answer,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “What is it?”

“It’s ‘Julia,’” I said, speaking quickly. “Meryl Streep’s first movie was ‘Julia’ starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave.”

The man looked irritated.

“How’d you know that?” he said. “I can’t believe you knew that. Man. OK, what sandwich do you want?”

“Really?” I said.

“What sandwich — you won. Come on. Hurry it up.”

He pointed to a menu on the wall. I couldn’t believe it. I had won a sandwich, and it was free, and I was broke and knew Meryl Streep’s first movie.

He made me a great sandwich — chicken salad on rye, maybe? I remember eating it in the spring sunshine, so happy to be out of Knoxville and on the streets of New York.

— Kerry Madden-Lunsford

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Gabrielle Ferrari and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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