She was America’s first saint, a tireless advocate who founded an upstate orphanage, a school for girls in Washington Heights and 67 organizations for the needy in the late 1880s.
But she wasn’t good enough to be named one of New York’s seven most important women.
Francesca Xavier Cabrini and other female icons were denied honorary statues after a group controlled by First Lady Chirlane McCray tossed out the revered Catholic sister in favor of more women of color and a drag queen-turned-LGBTQ activist.
This despite Cabrini getting the most votes in a poll of New Yorkers on who should be included.
“The whole process was a charade,” said Harriet Senie, who served on the panel that weighed the poll results and recommended to McCray that the city honor groups over individuals.
“The committee came up with five suggestions, all of them groups of women with the express intention of changing the existing paradigm of memorials. We were very clear and unanimous about that,” she told the art-news site Hyperallergic. “That really was an outrage.”
Also denied were poll leaders Emily Warren Roebling, who led the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Manhattan Music School founder Janet Schenck.
The She Built NYC project, which started last summer when McCray set out to balance the male-female mix of statues of prominent New Yorkers, asked for the public’s input — and more than 1,800 suggestions poured in, with some 320 women nominated.
Cabrini — who was known as Mother Cabrini and whose remains are entombed in a shrine at the former Mother Cabrini HS in Washington Heights — got 219 votes, which was tops.
McCray, the wife of Mayor de Blasio, then formed a blue-ribbon panel to review the results and make its own recommendations on the seven winners, who will be memorialized by six monuments in the city, funded by about $5 million in taxpayer money.
McCray made it clear from the beginning what she wanted.
“Growing up as an African-American woman, I didn’t see anyone who represented me in media or popular culture, even though women make incredible contributions,” she told NBC.
“Erecting statues of women is an easy way to correct that historical record.”
She and former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen made the final call, selecting jazz legend Billie Holiday, desegregation activist Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Latina doctor Helen Rodriguez Trias and LGBTQ advocate Sylvia Rivera, who was born Jose and described herself as a drag queen.
None was among the top seven women picked in the poll.
The other three are Shirley Chisholm, America’s first black congresswoman; Katherine Walker, who saved at least 50 victims of shipwrecks and boat accidents as keeper of the Robbins Reef Lighthouse; and Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist involved in the Stonewall uprising.
All but Walker are black or Hispanic.
Johnson and Rivera, co-founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and instrumental figures in the Stonewall uprisings, will share a monument in Greenwich Village.
Holiday, who received 16 votes in the poll, will have her statue erected at Queens Borough Hall.
The de Blasio administration has taken heat over its attitude toward monuments, and historians say the She Built NYC campaign builds on the administration’s “ahistorical approach.”
“This program was all cast in terms of snide, dismissive characterizations of the way in which people in the past operated . . . like they couldn’t be bothered to put up monuments of women,” said Michele Bogart, an art-history professor at Stony Brook University. “It wasn’t malicious. It was simply the way people thought.
“One hundred years from now, who is to say our attitudes in the present day won’t be taken to task?”
Additional reporting by Isabella Simonetti