UHPH 2016 Icons: The Making, Meaning and Undoing of Urban Icons and Iconic Cities | 275 The Iconography of Patriotism George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in Union Square Joanna Merwood-Salisbury School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington Joanna.merwood-salisbury@vuw.ac.nz An original component of the 1811 grid plan for New York City, Union Square has acquired an association as a place in which the ideals of American republicanism and democracy are both signified and enacted. The square is occupied by a central lawn, a series of statues, a small building to the north, and an open plaza set aside as a place for public meetings. Using the concept of “urban semiology” described by Roland Barthes, this paper is concerned with two things: the ways in which the signifying function of the square has been attributed variously to the statues and to the open space of the plaza; and the ways in which the signifying elements were first created, then altered and appropriated by different urban actors at different times over the past two centuries. Exploring the question of agency, of the mechanisms through which signification is achieved, the focus will be on the ways in which the statues and the open space of the plaza have served as symbols, icons, and indexes of political ideas. Concluding with the early Cold War period, when the symbolic expression of global politics across all forms of culture from media, to the arts, to architecture and city planning, was at its bluntest and least nuanced, the paper will discuss the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of the square in order to understand how and why the use and meaning of Union Square continues to be so contentious. Keywords: Located on Broadway between 14 th and 17 th Streets, Union Square in New York City includes both a major subway interchange and a landscaped park. Recently renovated by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, it plays host to a popular farmers’ market, and to formal and informal public gatherings on the southern end, seen here. (Fig. 1) Situated between social history and the history of urban design, this paper investigates the square as both a real public space and as the symbol of competing ideas about the operation of democracy in the United States. Employing Roland Barthes’ concept of “urban semiology,” it emphasizes the fluidity of signification and the misalignment between functional purpose and semantic meaning in the design and re- design of Union Square from its founding in the early-nineteenth century to the 1950s.