Cleopatra’s Needle, as it has long been known, stands approximately 70 feet high on the east side of Central Park, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art near 83rd Street. It is the city’s oldest man-made public sculpture.

Cleopatra’s Needle is one of a pair of granite obelisks (the other today sits on the banks of the Thames in London) from the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis (modern-day Cairo) built to commemorate the 40th year of the reign of Thothmes III (1476-1425 BCE). In 12 BCE, Roman Emperor Augustus moved the obelisks to Alexandria.

In 1869, the Khedive of Egypt gave Cleopatra’s Needle to the United States after the opening of the Suez Canal. Because of the challenging logistics, it took over a decade to arrange its transport, which was overseen by Lieutenant Commander Henry Honneychurch Gorringe (1841-1885). The project included the construction of a specially-designed railroad track, for which William H. Vanderbilt donated over $100,000, for transport up the Hudson River. When the obelisk was officially installed in New York City in January of 1881, tens of thousands of people turned up to see it in person, and manufacturers and retailers responded to this enthusiasm by producing souvenirs and memorabilia related to the event. One such example, a bronze model of the obelisk, is included in the Museum of the City of New York’s collection. The model was designed by Gorringe and cast and retailed by Tiffany & Company. Its lengthy inscription honors Henry George Stebbins (1811-1881), president of the Central Park Commission in 1880-1881 and a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vanderbilt’s donation, and Gorringe’s leadership in engineering its transport and erection.

Since the obelisk’s installation, the City of New York, its caretaker, has made efforts to preserve its structure and make its history accessible to the public. In 1940, then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses commissioned The New~York Historical Society to create a permanent plaque commemorating the monument’s history. Throughout the twentieth century, the surface of the obelisk degraded. In early 2011, Egypt’s then-Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, wrote to the Parks department imploring it to take measures to protect the obelisk from environmental factors that he believed were contributing to its degradation. He went as far as to imply that Egypt’s government would move to have the obelisk returned to Egypt if no action was taken. In 2014 the Central Park Conservancy worked on a half-million dollar conservation program for the monument which cleaned and stabilized its structure so it may “endure as a testament to the genius of a vanished civilization, an awe-inspiring tower holding its own on an island of modern skyscrapers.”