Cleopatra's Needle and the Four and a Half Men Named Henry

Behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past the Greywacke Arch, a seventy-foot red granite obelisk towers over the path. It looks out of place because it is: roughly 5,500 miles and 3,500 years out of place.

Cleopatra’s Needle was carved from a single piece of granite around 1475 BC, one of a pair raised to celebrate the fortieth year of the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose III. The hieroglyphs came about two centuries later, when Ramesses the Great decided the monument could use some good press about his military victories. Some sixteen hundred years after that the obelisk was dragged more than two hundred miles across the desert to Alexandria, where it stood for another eighteen centuries before its longest trip of all.

In the late nineteenth century the job of moving this 200-ton piece of someone else’s history to Manhattan fell to what our tour guide counts as four and a half men named Henry. Henry Hurlbert, a newspaper editor, had the idea. Henry Stebbins, the Commissioner of Public Parks, secured the funding — and if the name sounds familiar, his sister Emma Stebbins sculpted the Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Fountain, a few minutes back along the route. Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, a naval officer whose surname rhymes with orange, managed the logistical nightmare of actually doing it. And William Henry Vanderbilt paid for everything, Henry being only his middle name.

The logistics were real. Engineers built special contraptions to hoist the obelisk onto modified rail cars, and cut an obelisk-sized hole in the side of a steamship — large enough to slide the stone through, small enough that the whole enterprise wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the Atlantic. It was raised in Central Park in 1881.

Before it went up, Hurlbert was given the honor of placing two time capsules beneath it. One held the usual nineteenth-century fare: census ledgers, a Bible, the works of Shakespeare. The contents of the second have never been recorded, and it remains a mystery.

Cleopatra’s Needle is the last stop on the Central Park Space-Time Adventure Tour. Whether the mystery capsule has anything to do with a missing time crystal is something you’ll have to find out for yourself.