“We set out to correct a glaring inequity in our public spaces,” New York’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said in an interview on Thursday.

Ms. McCray credited Ms. Chisholm for inspiring a generation of women to seek public office. “I hope that putting up the statue now will encourage even more,” she said.

“I can’t think about her and what she accomplished before and after her run and not think ‘Oh, maybe I should do that too, you know?’ She really set an example, for all of us.”

Today is Ms. Chisholm’s birthday, and this is the 50th anniversary of her election to Congress, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

In 1972, she became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, and the first black woman to seek the presidential nomination of either major party. She died in 2005 at 80.