American sculptor George Edwin Bissell created a bronze statue depicting Abraham De Peyster, a mayor born in New Amsterdam in 1657 who came from a prosperous mercantile family, spent nine years on the family farm in the Netherlands, returned in 1684, rose through nearly all major colonial offices including alderman, mayor, member of the King’s Council, and acting governor, and became one of the city’s wealthiest merchants by the end of his life. In the late 19th century, Abraham’s great-great-great grandson John Watts De Peyster commissioned the work, which Bissell sculpted in his Mount Vernon, New York, studio and cast at the E. Gruet foundry in Paris. Bissell portrayed De Peyster in a lavish cloak, army boots, and with sword in hand to denote his political and military roles in colonial government. The sculpture was first placed in the center of Bowling Green Park in 1896 on a site once occupied by a statue of King George III, later underwent repairs and conservation after vandalism and wear, was removed in 1972 during park and subway renovations, relocated in 1976 to Hanover Square on a new pink granite pedestal, conserved again in 1999, displaced after the September 11, 2001 attacks when Hanover Square was redesigned in 2003 to honor British victims, and after a prolonged search was reinstalled in December 2013 in a recessed niche along the northern pathway of Thomas Paine Park. It was rededicated on July 3, 2014, the 357th anniversary of De Peyster’s baptism, in the presence of more than two dozen descendants, city officials, and the Netherlands Consul General.
