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The New York Times called it a day second only to the inauguration of a President, and on June 8, 1912, Washington believed them, because eighty thousand people filled the streets between Union Station and the Capitol in a parade that stretched farther than the eye could follow, viewing stands packed with twenty thousand more, a 21-gun salute rolling across the city, horse-drawn floats depicting the great moments of a man who had crossed an ocean without knowing what was on the other side. President Taft stood to dedicate the fountain, a distant relation of the sculptor Lorado Taft who had won the commission years earlier in a competition that drew nineteen artists from America, Spain, and Italy, each one trying to find stone words for a journey that had no map. Taft had taken his inspiration from the fountains of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and spent years shaping granite and marble into something that could hold the full weight of what 1492 meant, Columbus standing at the ship's prow staring forward, the Old World and the New World flanking him like the before and after of a story that changed every story that followed. The fountain ran for decades and then slowly fell silent, decades of neglect turning something monumental into something people walked past without quite seeing, travelers rushing through Columbus Circle to catch trains, the water still and the stone growing grey. Now, with twelve million dollars and a restoration that brought the figures back into the light they were carved for, the fountain speaks again outside Union Station, a ship's prow pointed toward the future the way it always was, carrying whatever it means to go somewhere no one has been before and come back changed forever.#WashingtonDC #ColumbusMemorial #UnionStation #AmericanHistory #fblifestyle