Credit: Dangerous Minds / Apeda Studio / Public Domain

New York City lies under the watchful gaze of one woman.

Raised above all who don’t find themselves in the upper reaches of the buildings in Manhattan, which truly earned the name skyscrapers. She stands in several different places at once, carved in gold, bronze, any kind of metal, in some of the most famous and infamous places in the city, a genuine symbol of NYC, yet few people could tell you her name.

This is because her name was deemed to be nowhere near as important as the characters she (quite literally) embodied. Civic Fame on top of the Manhattan Municipal Building. The Strauss Memorial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “Duty” and “Sacrifice” on the USS Maine Memorial at Columbus Circle. Those are just three of the statues that the same woman modelled throughout New York City alone, and there are many, many more. As many as 20 confirmed reports and hundreds of rumoured examples.

So, who was this woman? After all, we hate objectification here, and in this case, we have one of the most literal examples of it in modern history. All joking aside, no one deserves to be known only for their body and in the case of the woman here, it was one that made an awful lot of men very rich, respected and famous. Yet her name falls out of the history books despite having an incredibly compelling story of her own.

So, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Audrey Munson, born June 8th, 1891, in Rochester, New York. A child of the state that made her an icon but not the city, she and her mother moved to Washington Heights, New York City, when she was 17, and Munson began pursuing her performing dreams. Since the cinema was barely old enough to be an industry, Munson’s first aspirations were to perform on stage, seeking work as a dancer in Vaudeville.

However, as time went on and the cinema grew in popularity, Munson saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a whole new artistic movement.

How did Munson become a model?

While Munson picked up a few performing gigs here and there, her first real appearance in the spotlight came from a chance encounter with photographer Felix Benedict Herzog.

While window shopping with her mother on Fifth Avenue, he approached her and asked if she wanted to model for him at his studio. After discerning that yes, this was a legitimate offer, and yes, this was a paid offer, and no, this wasn’t to make porn, Munson and her mother accepted.

Munson became Herzog’s muse, and they worked so well together that he began introducing her to other artists in the New York scene. This was how Munson became the model for some of the great artists of that time, but her preference was to work with sculptors. Over the next few years, she became the go-to model for any sculptor commissioned to make a statue in New York City, so much so that The Sun of New York said, “Over a hundred artists agree that if the name of Miss Manhattan belongs to anyone in particular, it is to this young woman.”

She parleyed her success as a model into a film career in the 1910s and became especially notorious as one of the few actresses willing to be naked on screen in non-pornographic films. This made her so much of a sensation that in 1919, her landlord back in New York City, Dr Walter Wilkins, murdered his wife so he could marry Munson. This became a national scandal and, despite Munson swearing blind that she’d never had so much as a private conversation with Dr Wilkins, it torpedoed her promising film career.

Within three years, her career had dried up so much that she tried to end her life in 1922, and was committed to a mental institution by her mother in 1931. She spent the rest of her life at the St Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane, spending the next 65 years being treated for depression and schizophrenia before dying in 1996, at the age of 104. After her mother died in 1958, she wasn’t visited by anyone for 25 years.

A truly sad fate for someone who today embodies the aesthetic of one of the world’s great cities. If you ever find yourself in New Haven, New York, head down to her gravestone at the New Haven Cemetery and send her your love. She didn’t get anywhere near the level she deserved in life, but for as long as her likeness is still with us, she’ll always deserve it.