Cleopatra's Needle

Considering that it weighs more than 200 tons, the 70-foot obelisk that now stands in Central Park has proved quite mobile. Quarried near Aswan, it --- along with its mate in London --- was erected in Heliopolis by Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BCE. A few hundred years later, Ramses III inscribed it to celebrate his military prowess; about a thousand years after that, just after the death of the woman it is now inaccurately named for, it was dragged to Alexandria and set up in the Caesareum. (It was standing there when Pliny listed it among the wonders of sculpture in his Natural History.)

Fast forward another nineteen hundred years, and the khedive of Egypt gave it to the US, provided Americans could figure out a way to get it home. The NYC Parks Department stepped in, and a huge donation from William Vanderbilt enabled it to be brought --- via elephants, boats, and horses --- to Central Park. In a city that prides itself on reinvention and ambition, Cleopatra's Needle reminds us just how ephemeral our aspirations will be.