Richards requests Addisleigh Park monument to Holiday, Horne and Fitzgerald

Borough President Donovan RIchards is requesting a statue of Billie Holiday planned for outside Borough Hall be placed in Addisleigh Park instead. Photo by William Gottlieb via Library of Congress

By Rachel Vick

Queens leaders are looking to honor jazz icon and former Addisleigh Park resident Billie Holiday and other trailblazing local women with a monument true to their roots in the borough.

Borough President Donovan Richards urged Jasmine Baker Taddeo, deputy director of Women.nyc,  and the New York City Economic Development Corporation to install a monument to the singer in the neighborhood she called home instead of at Borough Hall.

“As our city and the great Borough of Queens continues to reopen, we are excited to move forward with this meaningful art campaign and the installation of a monument honoring iconic late singer Billie Holiday,” Richards wrote. 

Despite being built exclusively for white residents, Addisleigh Park  was home to African American including Count Basie and actress Lena Horne before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants violated the Equal Protection Clause in 1948.

Richards requested that Horne and fellow resident Ella Fitzgerald be honored and placed alongside Holiday in the memorial to the greats and an “irreplaceable” neighborhood.

The statue planned for Borough Hall was announced in 2019 as part of the city’s new “She Built NYC” statue initiative, but Richards said that installing the monument anywhere outside the St. Albans neighborhood they called home “would be a missed opportunity to honor the community.”

“Its evolution from an exclusively white area into a historically distinguished community for luminaries and leaders of the African American community illuminates the story of struggle and achievement of civil rights and home ownership for Black New Yorkers,” he added.  “There could not be a more appropriate location for the monument in their memory in Queens.”