When New York Snubbed Mary Poppins

January 1, 2012 - New York Times

By JAMES BARRON

Librado Romero/The New York TimesMark Bransdon, who edits a newspaper in Australia, by the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. In 1966, efforts by some Australians to place a Mary Poppins statue next to Alice in Wonderland were rebuffed.

If things had turned out differently 45 years ago, Mark Bransdon might have been looking at a life-size statue of Mary Poppins in Central Park, a few steps from the familiar statues of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice, of “Alice in Wonderland.”
But that is not what history had in mind, so Mr. Bransdon had traveled 9,992 miles to see if he could help rewrite it.
He is the editor of Southern Highland News in Bowral, Australia, an hour south of Sydney, where people are campaigning to right the great 1966 Mary Poppins snub. They want to do what New York did not: Cast the statue and put it in a park. And since Central Park is still off limits — “No new statues in Central Park,” Adrian Benepe, the commissioner of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, declared last week — they have their eye on a park in Bowral. For that is where P.L. Travers, the author who created the world’s most famous nanny, lived for several years starting around 1910.
Mr. Bransdon, in Manhattan for a break from 80-degree summer weather in Bowral, found the place where the statue might have gone if the project had not been killed almost as soon as it was announced in the fall of 1966. It was no Statue of Liberty: Where Lady Liberty holds the torch, Mary Poppins was to hold — what else? — her umbrella. In her other hand was her carpetbag.
Full story at The New York Times.