The Egyptian Obelisk That Crossed the Atlantic in 1880 in a Custom-Built Steamship and Now Stands in Central Park

The pink-granite obelisk now standing on Greywacke Knoll in Central Park, New York City, was carved at the Aswan quarries in Upper Egypt around 1450 BCE for Pharaoh Thutmose III of the 18th Dynasty. It is 21 metres tall (about 70 feet), weighs approximately 224 metric tons, and originally stood as one of a pair at the entrance to the temple of the sun-god Ra at Heliopolis, near modern Cairo.

The pair were moved by Roman engineers to Alexandria in 12 BCE during the early reign of Augustus, where they were re-erected outside the Caesareum, the temple of the deified Julius Caesar that Cleopatra VII had begun building in honour of her Roman patron. Cleopatra’s name attached to the obelisks despite her having had no involvement in their original carving or in their Alexandrian re-erection — the original Caesareum dedication had been to Augustus, not Cleopatra.

The pair stood at Alexandria for approximately 1,900 years. By the mid-19th century one had toppled and was lying half-buried in sand. The other was leaning at about three degrees from vertical.

The Khedive’s gift

The Khedive of Egypt Isma’il Pasha, presiding over the financial collapse of the modernising Egyptian state and looking for diplomatic-symbolic gestures to leading powers, offered the standing obelisk to Britain in 1819 (it remained in Alexandria for sixty more years and finally reached London in 1878), and the fallen obelisk to the United States in 1877. The New York railway baron William Henry Vanderbilt privately financed the American transport, eventually paying approximately $103,000 (about $3.2 million in 2025 dollars) for the operation.

The technical lead was the US Navy lieutenant-commander Henry Honychurch Gorringe, who had previously commanded the steamer Portsmouth on the European station and was the only American officer available with relevant heavy-cargo handling experience.

The voyage

Gorringe’s plan was unprecedented in scale. The obelisk was too long for any standard cargo hold of the period. He purchased the iron-hulled steamer Dessoug in Alexandria, cut a side hatch large enough to admit the obelisk horizontally through the hull, lowered the stone into the hold on hydraulic rams, sealed the hatch, and then sailed across the Atlantic with the 224-ton stone as the bulk of the cargo.

The Dessoug departed Alexandria on 12 June 1880 and arrived at the East River dock in New York on 20 July 1880 — a voyage of 112 days including a stopover in Gibraltar for repairs. The obelisk was offloaded onto the 96th Street pier and dragged overland through Manhattan to Central Park on a custom-built rail system. The overland transport took 112 days — the same number of days as the Atlantic voyage. The total distance from the East River to Central Park was approximately 3.5 km. The rail system moved the obelisk an average of 30 metres per day.

The erection

The 21-metre stone was raised at Greywacke Knoll between 16 and 22 January 1881 using a hydraulic system Gorringe had specifically engineered for the purpose. The erection was watched by a crowd estimated at 10,000 New Yorkers on a January morning at minus six degrees Celsius. The Freemasons of New York performed a Masonic dedication ceremony — the obelisk had been associated since the Renaissance with Masonic symbolism — that included approximately 9,000 robed Masons walking up Fifth Avenue from Wall Street.

What 145 years of New York have done

The obelisk had stood in essentially dry Egyptian air for approximately 3,400 years. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on its four faces were sharp and legible when it arrived in 1880. By 2010 the south and west faces were severely weathered — the hieroglyphs no longer legible to the naked eye in places — by a combination of New York atmospheric pollution (sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal smoke and later automobile exhaust), freeze-thaw cycles, and bird excrement.

The 2014 Central Park Conservancy restoration cleaned the granite using a laser system originally developed for the cathedral of Cologne. The hieroglyphs were stabilised but not restored. Gorringe and his 1880 contemporaries had not anticipated atmospheric deterioration on the scale that 20th-century industrial New York would deliver.

The pair’s companion stone — Britain’s obelisk on the Thames Embankment in London, raised in September 1878 — has weathered at approximately the same rate from approximately the same pollution.

Approximately 3,400 years of Egyptian desert produced less granite loss than approximately 100 years of British and American industrial city air.