That’s a picture of a cast-iron fence post on a 1910 apartment house in Manhattan. The form inside the outer cage is a lictor’s symbolic weapon. Lictors were low-level civil servants in the Roman Republic and acted as bodyguards to high-ranking officials. The symbolic weapon was an axe with bunch of sticks bundled around it, and is usually referred to by the name “fasces,” referring to the bundle.
In 1910, that symbol was a reference to the Roman Republic which was – for better or worse – still seen at that time as a historical model for the United States. It was more subtle than flying an American flag, or casting a flag into an iron fence, but carried a roughly similar meaning. In 1921, the newly-founded National Fascist Party of Italy not only used the fasces as its symbol, but was named after it. From that time forward, the symbolic meaning was quite a bit different.
There’s no reason that the owners of the co-op apartment house have to remove that fence post. It was not intended to convey the recent meaning of its symbol and, frankly, the vast majority of people who walk by it don’t notice it. But it does, today, send a somewhat mixed message.
