The Alice in Wonderland Statue: A Publisher, His Wife, and a Very Big Mushroom

Just north of Conservatory Water, the model-boat pond on Central Park’s east side, sits an eleven-foot bronze Mad Tea Party. Alice perches on a giant mushroom; the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the Dormouse crowd around her. It has been climbed on, sat on and polished smooth by children since 1959.

The statue was a gift to the children of New York from George Delacorte, the publisher who built Dell Publishing on pulp magazines and ten-cent comics. It was also a memorial: Delacorte’s wife Margarita, an enthusiastic reader and linguist who helped build the company, had recently died, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was her favorite book. The sculptor, José de Creeft, gave the Mad Hatter George Delacorte’s face, and Delacorte’s daughter Donna was the model for Alice.

Given what Delacorte actually published, our tour guide notes, New York narrowly escaped an alternate timeline in which the east side of the park features an eleven-foot statue of Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle.

Walk around the base and you’ll find inscriptions from “Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece of nonsense verse. Our working theory is that the text isn’t nonsense at all but a sensible public warning about the galumphing Jabberwock, a creature common in the park through the early twentieth century. There is no reason to be alarmed today. The last confirmed Jabberwock sighting in Central Park was several years ago.

That said: if you take the Central Park Space-Time Adventure Tour, scan the statue with your Walkie-Talkie Time Machine and look at the Mad Hatter’s hat. The tour uses Niantic’s Visual Positioning System to place augmented-reality content at centimeter accuracy, and what appears on the hat is a biologically accurate, time-displaced projection of Carroll’s monstrosity. It is equal parts delightful and scary.

Practical note: the entrance to the statue directly off the north end of Conservatory Water has a few stairs. For a step-free route, stay on the path to the left another 40 meters or so and use the second entrance on your right. The tour’s narration calls this out as you approach.