Garibaldi Memorial ca. 1937

After the defeat of his army, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi sought refuge from 1850 to 1854 with his friend Antonio Meucci, a Florentine stage designer and inventor, who had settled in this small cottage on Staten Island. In the 1880s, the house was given to the Garibaldi Society, and at the centenary of Garibaldi’s birth in 1907, the Society erected a concrete “pantheon” to “protect as well as glorify the poor, ungarnished wooden shrine.” Abbott’s photograph highlights the memorial’s oddest detail — a column piercing the porch of the house it was meant to preserve. In 1952, the decrepit “pantheon” was torn down, but the house is still maintained as the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum.