by Len Lear

He was called “The American Rodin” on the Japanese version of “60 Minutes.” He has been compared to Bernini, Michelangelo, Rodin, Brancusi, Ghiberti, Maya Lin and other legendary sculptors, past and present. But Zenos Frudakis, 69, who has lived in Glenside for 33 years and has created more than 100 large sculptures for countries all over the world, is best known in Philadelphia for just one — the highly controversial Frank Rizzo statue that stands in front of the Municipal Services Building. Frudakis used clay on the statue that had been handed down by D.C. French, who sculpted the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The nine-foot-tall bronze statue, which was finally taken down by the city in the early hours of June 4, weighs more than a ton and was a lightning rod for controversy ever since it was placed across the street from City Hall in 1998. From the beginning there were calls to take it down, and it was often spray painted with graffiti. Opponents, primarily African Americans, have called Rizzo a “racist” (he once publicly urged his supporters to “vote white”) and a “brutal cop” while many others, mostly white working class Philly residents, idolized Rizzo for being “tough on crime” and “firm but fair.”

During the chaos in center city on Saturday night, May 30 (as opposed to peaceful demonstrations earlier in the day), rioters attempted to set fire to the statue, spray paint it, pull it down and hit its head repeatedly with a hammer, all to the cheers and applause of the crowd.

Frudakis, of course, was disturbed to see this attack on his creation, but he also had a reaction one might not expect.

“I definitely do understand the strong feelings about it,” said the sculptor a few days later, “and if they feel that strongly about it, I have no objection to having it taken down in an orderly fashion and moving it, possibly to South Philly (where Rizzo was born and raised and where he still has many passionate supporters).

“What they did was silly, though, because bronze does not burn, and the man with the hammer probably hurt himself more than he did the statue. But the most important thing for me is that I did not want to see anyone get hurt. People have been badly hurt or even killed by falling statues. Rizzo's arm is heavier than the entire rest of the statue.

“I had to have a structural engineer work on it because the arm had to be attached in a certain way. If the statue had fallen, it would have fallen forward, and there is no ground under it, so it might have fallen right through the sidewalk to a subway underneath, as opposed to my statues at Citizens Bank Park (of Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton), which both do have ground and foundation under them. They would not open up the ground under them.”

Contrary to what one might predict, Frudakis' own politics are about as far away as those of Frank Rizzo as possible.

“George Floyd was publicly lynched by cops hiding behind a police uniform and badge, similar to what some soldiers do in war,” he said. “I am probably to the left of Bernie Sanders. What happened to George Floyd has been happening for a long time.

“I know blacks who are afraid to see a police car behind them, so I am very sympathetic to the protesters because these things have been going on for far too long, but it certainly does not help those who vandalize stores in their own neighborhood. How does looting and destruction relate to George Floyd? I have a relative who went to a Home Depot in Port Richmond when vandals began looting a Target store right next door. That was very scary.”

There was some criticism among protesters that the Rizzo statue was cleaned up quickly by the city, unlike much of the other damage caused by rioters in center city and low-income neighborhoods, but Frudakis defended it because “if it wasn't cleaned up, it would just encourage others to do the same thing.”

Some critics have compared the Rizzo statue to those of Confederate generals, hundreds of which were erected in the south after the Civil War to change the narrative of the war from that of slavery to that of heroic underdogs fighting to uphold an honorable way of life. “Some of those statues are not very good, so they might as well take them down,” said Frudakis, “but some others are very good. If you take them down, what about those of Jefferson and George Washington, both of whom had slaves. Even Benjamin Franklin had slaves early in life.”

Frudakis, who came to Philly in 1972 to study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Art, is no stranger to controversy. In 2017 he sculpted a statue of Clarence Darrow, a famous liberal lawyer who had been hired by the American Civil Liberties Union to defend John Scopes, a high school science teacher who was put on trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, for the “crime” of teaching evolution. Frudakis' statue was placed in front of the courthouse in the small Tennessee town near one of William Jennings Bryant, the famous lawyer and former Democratic Presidential candidate who prosecuted Scopes (who was found guilty and fined $100).

“Before the statue was erected,” said Frudakis, “a lady minister holding a shotgun said she would shoot me if the statue was put up. A non-profit organization hired an armed guard to protect me, and the story was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The lady minister was like a character from the Beverly Hillbillies. I was actually more afraid that a guy with a deer rifle would pick me off from long distance.”

For more information, visit zenosfrudakis.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com