Reed Creates Moynihan Portrait
When Congress passed a bill to rename the federal courthouse at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, the senator asked Wesleyan Professor of English and American Studies Joe Reed to create a bronze bas–relief portrait of him. Reed had done an earlier bronze medal of Moynihan for the Citizens’ Council of New York. He used an enlargement of the drawing for that as a guide for the new bronze, which measures 13 inches in diameter, for the Moynihan Courthouse. Cast in bronze, Reed’s portrait can be seen at 500 Pearl Street in New York, on a plaque to the left at the entrance.
“I met Pat in 1965,” Reed recalls. “At that point he was making a bid for president of the City Council. Wesleyan Author in Residence Paul Horgan went down to New York and told him that if the election didn’t go his way, Pat had a year–long appointment at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Study. Pat lost, so he packed the family in the car and moved to Middletown. He was here for the year before he went to Harvard, India, and the U.N. We got to know them well that year?I went gravestone rubbing with Liz and the kids.”
Reed and his wife, novelist Kit Reed, attended the opening ceremonies on Monday, Dec. 4, at the 26–story building, along with several hundred guests including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and then Senator–elect from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton.