Miss Manhattan
Audrey Munson’s radiant rise begins with New York’s great self-glorification at the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Centerpiece for its grand banquet: a marble sculpture of the three graces. Eighteen-year-old Audrey modeled for all three.
Soon she is posing for statues before the Plaza Hotel and atop the Municipal Building, among others, and she is the first woman to appear naked in a movie. But times and tastes change-and then come the horrors of the Great War, when artists no longer sculpt lofty themes such as “virtue” and “beauty.” Her luminescent career eventually darkens into a trail of loss and despair.
Then, in 1990, a young artist gradually recognizes the same face on statues throughout the city, inspiring an intricate and often frustrating search that will lead two remarkable women to touch hands across generations.
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Stephen Wolf was born in Chicago and moved to New York’s Lower East Side in 1976. He is the editor of I Speak of the City: Poems of New York, with his city features appearing in The Villager and The New York Times, and short stories in commercial and literary magazines. Despite seeing statues of her for years across Manhattan, Stephen had never heard of Audrey Munson until researching his acclaimed Central Park Love Song: Wandering Beneath the Heaventrees. A former bike messenger, truck driver, gymnastics coach, and construction worker with a PhD in American literature from the University of Illinois, he teaches college literature, writing, and New York studies.
