"Civic Virtue" depicts a nearly-nude club-carrying man trampling two mermaids, Vice and Corruption. It originally stood in Manhattan's City Hall park, where it was meant to impart moral lessons to New York City's scandal-plagued government. It failed. Part of its problem was that it was conceived in 1904, but not unveiled until 1922, when the scandals were long forgotten. Another problem was that people hated it.
In 1941 the sculpture was banished to a park outside the municipal hall of Queens, where it again failed to inspire virtue, but at least wasn't noticed as much by people who hated it. That lasted until 2011, when a pair of local grandstanding politicians claimed that the statue was abusive to women,* and demanded that it either be retired to Green-Wood Cemetery, or sold on CraigsList.
Civic Virtue weighs 57 tons, and was said to be the largest work of art carved from a single block of marble since Michelangelo's David. Its sculptor, Frederick William MacMonnies, was unaffected by people's hatred of his work, and went on to design the U.S. medal awarded to Charles Lindbergh.
*One of those politicians, representative Anthony Weiner, later confessed to tweeting women to see pictures of his crotch.
