This fall, a few weeks after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced the creation of a panel tasked with evaluating the history of his city’s own statuary, called the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. The announcement came in what might be thought of as a season of reckoning with America’s past. Three months before the events in Charlottesville, four statues commemorating the Confederacy were taken down in New Orleans. Universities such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Columbia have all recently established committees to examine their institutions’ ties to slavery, as well as the racist legacies of individuals who have been honored or memorialized on their campuses. The cultural landscape of New York City was not shaped by the same kind of white redemptionism that has afflicted cities such as New Orleans and Charlottesville, where Confederate statues were used to create a more benign, airbrushed image of white supremacy, but debates over the significance of the city’s monuments have been no less fraught. As de Blasio’s commission noted in its final report, released on Friday, New York City’s portfolio of statues and monuments has, like that of many other cities, tended to “celebrate some histories and erase others.”

The commission did not call for the removal of any city statues, but it did recommend relocating certain monuments or changing their context: the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle; the plaque for the French general Philippe Pétain on Broadway; the equestrian statue of President Theodore Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History; and the statue of the gynecologist J. Marion Sims on Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. Rather than deploying the dry, bureaucratic language of committee deliberation, the commission’s final report engaged with complex questions of selective memory, the moral attitudes implicit in the writing of history, and the ways in which our understanding of the past impacts the present. “So much about our narratives of who we are as a people is a reflection of who has power, who has privilege, and I think our history has been written in a way that privileges the experience of some Americans while not giving, I think, a respectful reflection of everyone who's contributed to this nation,” Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and co-chair of the commission, said. (The commission’s other co-chair was Tom Finkelpearl, New York’s commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs.) The Mayor’s office initially called on the committee to review any “symbols of hate” situated on city property, but the questions that the eighteen-person committee wound up grappling with were in some ways larger, and in many ways more subtle, than simply identifying fountains of contempt.

In addition to three formal meetings held this fall and winter, the Commission hosted hearings in each of the city’s boroughs, and distributed a public survey to generate feedback. Each of the four figures that attracted the commission’s special attention has a complicated history, subject to shades of interpretation. J. Marion Sims was a pioneering gynecologist in the nineteenth century who performed medical experiments on enslaved black women in the South without anesthesia. Last year, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called for the removal of the statue of Sims. Pétain, who received a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes for his leadership during the First World War, later became part of the Vichy government in France, a regime that collaborated with the Nazis. Monuments to Columbus are criticized for papering over the genocide of indigenous people. Teddy Roosevelt, a vocal supporter of eugenics, once wrote that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.”

The commission grappled with these issues, and with their counterarguments. “Italian immigrants in the eighteen-nineties desperately wanted to see themselves as American, and Columbus provided that pathway,” Walker told me, referring to the history of the Columbus statue. “Understanding that context does not obviate the fact of genocide of Native Americans.” The Commission’s final recommendations generally took a moderate approach—pushing to broaden the way controversial works are seen rather than razing those monuments. The most visible change will affect the Sims statue, which was recommended for relocation. (The Mayor’s office has decided to place it in Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried.) The three other monuments will remain where they are but will be given additional historical context, establishing a more complicated narratives about the people they memorialize. The commission recommended that the city build a new statue to celebrate the lives of indigenous people. It did not reach a full consensus on the Roosevelt monument, but the Mayor’s office is considering additional explanatory signage and educational programming.

The commission also established a new system through which the city can document and examine other controversial public works. In response to these recommendations, de Blasio’s office released a statement: “Reckoning with our collective histories is a complicated undertaking with no easy solution. Our approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to—instead of removing entirely—the representations of these histories.” The city has earmarked ten million dollars over the next four years for the creation of monuments to celebrate underrepresented histories and offer correctives to conventional narratives by reflecting the broader past. That money is augmented by a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant that the Ford Foundation will provide to establish the New York City Public History project, which will spearhead another of the commission’s recommendations: the creation of a standing committee to comprehensively evaluate the city’s other monuments and landmarks. Regarding the future work on the subject, de Blasio noted, “We’ll be taking a hard look at who has been left out and seeing where we can add new work to ensure our public spaces reflect the diversity and values of this great city.” Already, the Mayor’s office has agreed to commission additional markers to recognize the enslaved women whose sacrifices made Sims’s work possible.