The Obelisk

The Obelisk before you is the oldest outdoor monument in New York City. Carved from a single massive block of red granite in the Aswan quarries of Egypt around fourteen hundred and twenty-five BCE, it predates the city by over three millennia. Pharaoh Thutmose III commissioned it for the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, and it once stood as part of a pair intended to connect the earth to the heavens. While it is famously nicknamed Cleopatra's Needle, the structure has no historical connection to the queen herself. The name likely arose centuries later from a misunderstanding of its origins in Alexandria, where the obelisks were moved by the Romans to stand before a temple dedicated to Julius Caesar.