• New York’s mayor will open the roof of Manhattan Municipal Building to free public tours. 
• The building is home to Manhattan’s tallest and loftiest sculpture, Civic Fate.
• The artwork’s model, Audrey Munson, had a storied career—and a tragic life story. 

From her perch atop the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building, the 25-foot-tall statue Civic Fate looks out over Lower Manhattan, a gilded beacon and the island’s largest artwork (unless you count the Statue of Liberty, which is technically in New Jersey). Come June, New Yorkers will be able to visit the cupola right below the sculpture, as part of Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s efforts to open more public spaces in the city.

“As we begin to celebrate Black History Month, it felt fitting to honor the legacy of our city’s first Black mayor right here,” Mamdani said in a video announcing the plan. “From up here, you can see everything from MetLife Stadium all the way to Bushwick. This building belongs to the people of this city, but for too long, most New Yorkers have been shut out of it. That’s coming to an end. We’re opening the rooftop of the Dinkins Municipal Building to the public.”

The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) will be offering free tours of the rooftop for small groups starting in June, following a $6 million improvement project on the building. The plans include repairs to the cupola and installing glass barriers for visitor safety as guests enjoy the panoramic views.

“It shouldn’t be just the wealthy who enjoy the inspiration of an observation deck. New Yorkers should have an opportunity to look down upon the city they love,” Comptroller Mark Levine added in a statement. “When we open our civic institutions, we not only live up to our welcoming identity, we create a new way for New Yorkers to know and enjoy their home.”

Audrey Munson with her cat, Buzzer, in 1915. Photo by Arnold Genthe, U.S. Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

The Civic Fate sculpture, by Adolph Alexander Weinman, sits atop a central eight-story tower that rises in the center of the main 26-story building. The Manhattan firm Broschart and Braun fabricated the artwork from 500 pieces of hammered copper affixed to a steel or iron frame. It cost just $9,000, or about $300,000 today. Civic Fate was last restored and re-gilded in 1991.

The model for the work was the actress Audrey Munson, considered the nation’s first supermodel and a popular model for allegorical sculptures by many leading artists of the period. Her visage graces at least 12 artworks in New York City, including sculptures at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Munson’s prominent yet overlooked role in art history, and New York City civic life, is a story that ended in tragedy. The heights of her modeling career, which began in 1909, included a star turn as the face of hundreds of Alexander Stirling Calder’s sculptures for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition.

Civic Fate on the top of Manhattan’s David N. Dinkins Municipal Building. Photo ©2024 by Jason Lee, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

But by 1919, Munson had become embroiled in scandal. The owner of the boarding house where she lived with her mother killed his wife, and claimed he did it so he could marry Munson. She claimed there had been no romantic relationship, but her career never fully recovered.

“What becomes of the artists’ models?” Munson wrote in a series of ghostwritten articles for Hearst’s Sunday Magazine in 1921. “Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful? What has been her reward? Is she happy and prosperous, or is she sad and forlorn, her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake?”

Munson tried to kill herself in 1922, and her mother had her committed to St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, New York, in 1931. She would spend the rest of her life in treatment, dying at the age of 104.

The Manhattan Municipal Building was constructed between 1909 and 1914, and designed by William M. Kendall of the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White, with a mix of ancient Roman, Beaux-Arts, and French and Italian Renaissance styles. One of the largest governmental buildings in the world, it has been a New York City Landmark since 1966, and on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972.