A Tribute to a ‘French Founding Father’

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Mark Schneider portraying the Marquis de Lafayette.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times

By James Barron

Two hundred years ago this weekend, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited New York — the first stop on a tour that would take him all over the still-young nation — his three-masted packet ship docked first on Staten Island. Lafayette sailed on to Manhattan the next morning.

Today and tomorrow, when a re-enactor follows Lafayette’s itinerary, he will go by water taxi.

There will be a 13-gun salute, as there was 200 years ago. And there will be a procession to City Hall, as there was when some 80,000 people — roughly half of the city’s population at the time — filled the streets to see the “French founding father,” as some Americans called him.

He rode in a horse-drawn carriage. This time around, the carriage will be motorized.

But the organizers of the 200th-anniversary recreation of Lafayette’s trip plan to party like it’s 1824, with costumes and ceremonies commemorating his 6,000-mile tour across 24 states. Even though Lafayette was an old soldier by then — he was 66 when he arrived in New York — his fame had not faded away. He was still revered for fighting in his 20s with George Washington and for helping to force Lord Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

Mark Schneider, who will portray Lafayette, will board the water taxi on Staten Island. He knows the role: He has played Lafayette at Colonial Williamsburg for 25 years, so long that his friends call him “Marquis Mark.”

Some real Lafayettes will be on hand for the weekend’s ceremonies, too: Virginie Bureaux de Pusy-Dumottier de Lafayette, the marquis’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, and two of her six children, Héloïse, 22, and Adélaïde, 20, Barbier-Dumottier de Lafayette.