Pelham Bay Park

This massive, salvaged limestone sculpture by French-born artist Louis St. Lannes depicts a partially clad male youth that once adorned a temple niche in Pelham Bay Park’s Rice Stadium.

In 1919, Julia Rice offered the City of New York $1,000,000 to erect a recreational facility in memory of her late husband: lawyer, financier, and inventor Isaac Rice (1850-1915). The location chosen for this facility was the southern end of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, not far from the battery factory that Rice had owned and operated.

The elaborate, classically styled stadium and indoor recreational building, erected in the early 1920s, included decorative Olympics-inspired friezes and sculptures as well as the statue of American Boy. Installed on a pedestal at the top of the grandstand, a pedimented canopy covered the sculpture.

Over the years, the cost of stadium upkeep proved a burden the city could not bear. The stadium’s structural integrity had declined to such an extent that it was deemed a public safety hazard and demolished in 1989. The statue made a cameo appearance in the Hollywood movie True Love, filmed in 1989 shortly before the stadium’s demise, and released in 1990. Extensively eroded and badly damaged, the artwork was restored at that time.

American Boy is inspired by the stylized ancient art of the Archaic Greek period. Sculptor Louis St. Lannes intended it to embody the spiritual ideals of American youth and to serve as an allegorical representation of healthy recreation.