Last night, the celebration of the event, which is believed to be the first step in a great system of tunnels under the Hudson, was continued with a banquet at Sherry’s. The regular service began with the starting of the first train at midnight.
President Roosevelt pressed the button which formally opened the tunnel at 3:40 o’clock eastern time, yesterday afternoon, immediately following the receipt of this telegram from President McAdoo:
The first official train of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company, under the Hudson River, awaits your signal and pleasure.
With the unveiling on Monday of the new statue on Riverside Drive, Jeanne d’Arc takes her place permanently in New York city. New York is not the most natural of settings for Jeanne d’Arc, burgerette of Domremy-sur-Meuse, warrior, woman saint of France, but since she is to be here, the Drive is a good place for her. There is an open sweep of view there, and hills beyond. And, in early mornings, and at twilight when the lights on the river begin to show coral in the blue-gray mist, something very like the spirit of the city is made visible.
It is this same characteristic--the seeing of the invisible, the touching of the intangible--which is in the statue and makes it what it is. Anna Vaughn Hyatt, its sculptor, sees only the spiritual in Jeanne, and in her work she holds indefinitely for us the moment after the finding of the consecrated sword, which Jeanne holds high over her head as she stands erect in her saddle, her head thrown back in exaltation. The horse is all but prancing. There is something of certainty and joyousness about the whole which could be inspired by nothing purely material or temporal. The upward gesture of the sword is not without meaning--it is the natural movement of a person who has had a great revelation, a deep creative instinct. She is holding the sword up to God.
The idea of the statue for this city, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jeanne in 1412, and to be made by an American woman sculptor, is about six years old, and originated with J. Sanford Saltus and George Frederick Kunz. They are, respectively, the honorary president and president of the Joan of Arc Statue Committee, founded December 4, 1909, of which Gabriel Hanotaux and Pierre Loti, membres de l’Institut Français, are the honorary vice-presidents. The work has taken time and it has been well done. Besides the Committee of twenty-four members, and the sculptor herself, there was an architect, Prof. John V. Van Pelt, a landscape architect, Carl F. Pilat, a consultant on armor, Bashford Dean, Ph.D., curator of armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cass Gilbert, adviser of architectural competition, a jury on architectural competition, and a Committee of the Municipal Art Commission on Whole Design.