Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. This month we’re adding the stories of important L.G.B.T.Q. figures.

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The Angel of the Waters alighted in Central Park with more of a thud than a splash.

“All had expected something great, something of angelic power and beauty,” The New York Times wrote of the unveiling of the Bethesda fountain statue on June 1, 1873, “and when a feebly-pretty idealess thing of bronze was revealed the revulsion of feeling was painful.”

“The figure resembles a servant girl executing a polka,” the unnamed reviewer added.

It was an inauspicious debut for the first public art commission ever awarded to a woman in New York City.

But over the decades, as the Angel watched over picnics, parties and wedding proposals, and appeared in movies and television shows as a silent observer of musical numbers and grand romantic moments on the park’s Bethesda Terrace, she became all but synonymous with New York.