Manual e Sousa, a manager for the city’s Portuguese Trade Commission wrote a fully illustrated biography on the Queen and assisted in a Queens Museum of Art exhibition for the 300th anniversary of Queen Catherine.

It was over dinner in Flushing restaurant that Sousa and then-Queens Museum director, Janet Schneider jumped at the idea of producing a monument of the Queen in a prime Queens location.

Sousa founded the Friends of Queen Catherine, an organization to promote her identity.

They organized an artistic competition for the design of the statue, and chose internationally acclaimed sculptor Audrey Flack who started work on the statue in a foundry upstate in Beacon, New York. Friends of Queen Catherine raised funds for the statue by holding benefit concerts, dinners at the Plaza Hotel and other events, which raked in more than $2.5 million.

Supporters of the Queen Catherine statue grew to an impressive list of international government figures, European royalty and officials, and business leaders.

The list also included Borough President Claire Shulman, Donald Trump, and a committee that included former President Jimmy Carter. The statue was supposed to bring pride to the borough, call attention to its history and represent the most ethnically diverse group of neighborhoods in the world.

Dressing the Queen

Flack’s design of the statue would show the Queen with an orb in her hand, symbolizing the Queen’s role in bridging the new and old world. The statue is to be 35 feet high and built in four phases. The first model was 22 inches, enlarging to 44 inches, 10 feet, and then to its full size, to be cast in bronze. It was to be completed in time for the 100th anniversary of the consolidation of the five boroughs.

History Revisited

A 10-year land use permit called for the statue to be erected along at Hunter’s Point on a land project by the Port Authority as part of the Queens West development. The statue of Queen Catherine was to stand on a 15-foot bronze clad dome platform with a four-sided, five-foot high staircase. The statue would have faced the UN. This act already caused a little stir.

The statue of Queen Catherine currently rests in a foundry in upstate N.Y.

"I always felt that the location was bad," said Stanley Cogan, the borough’s official Historian and chair of the Queens Historical Society. Cogan didn’t think it was fair that the statue would gaze upon the UN "and all Hunters Point and Queens would get was her backside."

As the project progressed and more people became aware of the Queen, some questioned the legitimacy of a British monarch that would overlook Queens.

Jeffrey Kroessler, a history teacher at Long Island University and the head of the Queens Preservation League, had asked the Tribune in 1995, "Why is this Portuguese Princess worthy of this honor? Because by accident she was married to the English monarch at the moment when the royal province of New York was divided into administrative units called counties? Because she is a woman?"

A revisited history on the Queen spurred groups to rise up against the monarch. It is alleged that the Queen and her family had profited off the slave trade.

In 1997, Rev. Charles Norris of the Jamaica-based Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church told the Tribune, "We’re not going to sit idly by and let them erect a statue to honor a person who benefited from the slave trade."

Norris joined forces with activist Betty Dopson, who organized the ad hoc Friends Against Queen Catherine.

Irish American Queensites were also upset with notion that a British monarch that would soon eclipse the Calvary Cemetery. The cemetery was established for the Irish immigrant population, which never fancied the British crown.

On top of that, the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Kips Bay took place near the statues ill-fated location. The patriots fled to Manhattan and headed north.

David Gold of Oakland Gardens, an amateur historian on Queens, wrote an op-ed piece questioning why the Queen should be honored. After studying the history of Queen Catherine he found that when she was regent of Spain, "the Portuguese government had burned sixty people to death in Lisbon because the Inquisition had found them ‘guilty’ of the ‘crime’ of being Jews."

The issue culminated to a public hearing held at the Borough Hall in December of 1997. By January 1998, Shulman decided that the statue be placed on private land, instead of quasi-public land.

Today, the fate of the Queen rests in the hand of her creators. Infighting between the artists and the benefactor dragged the fight over the statue to court. Despite strong opposition and Borough President Claire Shulman’s withdrawal of support, Sousa moved to continue building the statue, with or without the original artist.

The statue currently rests is in a foundry upstate in Beacon on the grounds of Tallix, Inc, where she is waiting to be cast in bronze.

By March 1998, Tallix, stopped working on the statue, which was in its final stages. The Friends of Queen Catherine and Tallix resolved their differences in January 1999 and Tallix agreed to assemble and finish the statue for it to be shipped. This new agreement had Sousa supervising the project, without Flack’s final say on the 35’ bronze statue.

But Flack found out that the face of the statue was damaged. The sculpture of the head was placed outdoors, where Mother Nature took its toll on Catherine’s face. Her face had to be reconstructed for the clay molds. Although Flack offered to re-sculpt the face for an additional fee, her assistant David Simon was hired instead.

In the court case it was alleged that an inexperienced Simon created a "distorted, mutilated model," warping the nose, nostrils, eyes and lips. And in Sept. 1999, Flack dragged the issue to court again, getting a temporary restraining order on the construction. This prevented Tallix from casting the head in bronze.

Some of Flack’s arguments were that her rights as an artist were violated under the Copyright acts and the Visual Artist Act of 1990 and there was a breach of contract. The defendants, Friends of Queen and Tallix moved top dismiss her claims.

After a year in courts a decision was rendered in April, in favor of Flack, but it denied her motion on a preliminary injunction for the statue.

"They hired the assistant and he did an unacceptable job and it violated her rights," said Barbara Hoffman, Flack’s attorney. Hoffman said the case is on the verge of going on trial.

When Hoffman was asked about Flack’s feeling on the ordeal, Hoffman said, "She worked ten years on this. It’s like a stillborn child."

It is not clear whether the statue will ever be used.

Hoffman said, "For the time being Catherine is Dead. Whether it will ever be revived is a question."