Golda Meir Square – Broadway at 39th Street, New York, New York

In 1979, the plaza between 39th and 40th Streets on Broadway in midtown Manhattan was officially designated as Golda Meir Memorial Square. This bust of Golda Meir, by Beatrice Goldfine, was dedicated on October 3, 1984. Commissioned by the Jewish Community Relations Council, the bronze bust rests on a pink granite pedestal and measures a total of six and a half feet tall.

Golda Meir (born Golda Mabobitch, 1898-1978, one of the founders of the State of Israel, served as the Minister of Labour, Foreign Minister, and then as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel from March 17, 1969 (at age 70) to June 3, 1974. She is the first (and, to date, only) female Prime Minister of Israel, the third female Prime Minister in the world, and the first female head of state to oversee the development of a nuclear weapons program. She led Israel through the Yom Kippur War and the War or Attrition, and ordered the "Operation Wrath of God" following the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games.

Golda Meir Square occupies part of the site of the old Metropolitan Opera House. Built in 1883 by Gilded Age businessmen like William Vanderbilt who were denied boxes at the Academy of Music on 14th Street, it soon eclipsed the older venue as the central stage of New York society (as depicted in Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country). It saw the American debuts of Enrico Caruso (on November 23, 1903), who performed here 861 times, and of Vaslav Nijinsky (on April 12, 1916). In 1966, the beloved opera house was doomed by the Metropolitan Opera company, which insisted, when it moved to Lincoln Center, that the building’s buyer tear it down so that a rival opera company could not use it.