Exactly 100 years ago today, a crowd of 2,000 people gathered near the entrance to the Carnegie Library in Oakland to dedicate a memorial to Pittsburgh political leader Christopher Lyman Magee.

The memorial, depicting a noble woman holding an overflowing cornucopia, had been fashioned by Augustus Saint Gaudens, the most famous sculptor in America.

In the century since, time has taken its toll, both on the bronze and granite of the memorial and on the reputations of Magee and Saint Gaudens.

Christopher Magee was one of the most powerful political bosses in America in his lifetime, and virtually ran Pittsburgh and Allegheny County in the last 20 years of the 19th century, yet he is little remembered today, except in the name of the hospital he founded in honor of his mother, Magee-Womens Hospital.

Augustus Saint Gaudens' legacy has fared better, but it is only in recent years that his magnificent body of work has come back into the public eye, first through a traveling exhibition that visited Pittsburgh four years ago, and now through a public television documentary that will be broadcast nationally later this year.

The Magee memorial was one of his last public monuments. By the time it was unveiled, both he and Magee were gone, dead at relatively young ages.

Magee died in Harrisburg, where he was serving as a state senator, in 1901, at the age of 52. Saint Gaudens died at the age of 59 at the art colony he helped establish in Cornish, N.H., now a national historic site in his honor.

The memorial itself is done in the bas-relief style that Saint Gaudens made famous. Some experts say that this technique, in which the figure often stands out by only a fraction of an inch from the background, is the most difficult to do well because of the way light strikes the surface.

Next to the robed woman are Shakespeare's words from "The Merchant of Venice" -- "The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

The only reference to Magee is his name, etched into the base of the memorial, which was designed by Saint Gaudens' longtime friend, architect Stanford White.

Saint Gaudens and White worked together on several public sculptures, and White has his own notorious Pittsburgh connection. Two years before the Magee Memorial ceremony, White was shot to death in New York by jealous Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw.

At the foot of the memorial's stele is a lion's head that used to spout water into a small pool and help attract passers-by.

The memorial has been dry now for years, but the leaders of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy hope to change that.

Meg Cheever, conservancy president, said the group is in the midst of renovating the nearby Mary Schenley memorial fountain in front of the Frick Fine Arts Building, and then hopes to begin raising $400,000 to $500,000 to restore the Magee Memorial and turn it into a working fountain again.

The Schenley fountain, titled "A Song to Nature," was dedicated in 1918 and created by Victor David Brenner, designer of the Lincoln penny, and will also cost nearly a half million dollars to renovate, she said.

The sculptures were originally designed as a sort of gateway into Schenley Park, whose land was donated to the city by Mary Schenley. "Restoring these sculptures is essential to preserve the important works of art created by two pioneering artists who changed the direction of American art at the turn of the 20th century," says a conservancy brochure.

It may also bring renewed attention to the life of Christopher Magee.

Saint or scalawag?

Magee, whose forebears came to Pittsburgh when it was still a collection of log cabins, became the city's treasurer when he was just 25. He served in that position for only a few years and didn't hold public office again until he was elected to the state Senate in his late 40s.

In between, though, he ran the city and most of the county as a political machine boss, one of several who dominated big-city governments in the late 1800s, the most notable of whom was William "Boss" Tweed in New York.

Like many prominent political leaders of the time, Magee was either a generous saint of a man or a corrupt scalawag, depending on whose view was being expressed.

One of the more laudatory biographical sketches was written by Stephen Quinon, a journalist who worked for the Pittsburgh Times, which Magee owned.

Quinon described Magee as a benevolent visionary who improved the city and looked out for the underdog. When Magee bought up and consolidated the city's trolley lines -- an endeavor that generated enormous personal wealth for him -- Quinon said it was done mainly to benefit everyday workers.

Better trolley service, he wrote, "induced those who dwelt in crowded quarters to find homes for themselves on the outskirts of the city, where there was pure air, a touch of nature and freedom from many temptations for both young and old."

During the Christmas holidays, said another biography located in the archives of Magee-Womens Hospital, "he stood on the steps of the old Fidelity Trust Building and gave silver dollars to young newsboys."

A starkly different depiction of Magee's influence came from Lincoln Steffens, a muckraking journalist who wrote a 1904 book titled "The Shame of the Cities."

In the chapter "Pittsburg: A City Ashamed" -- the city was then spelled without the "h" -- Steffens castigated Magee and his political ally, state legislator William Flinn, for the way they ran the city.

"Minneapolis was an example of police corruption," Steffens wrote. "St. Louis of financial corruption. Pittsburg is an example of both police and financial corruption."

As just one example, Steffens wrote about how the Magee machine did favors for businessmen who wanted to expand their plants. "A foundry occupies a block, spreads to the next block and wants the street between. In St. Louis the business man boodled for his street. In Pittsburg he went to Magee, and I have heard such a man praise Chris, 'because when I called on him his outer office was filled with waiting politicians, but he knew I was a business man and in a hurry; he called me in first, and he gave me the street without any fuss.'"

Even as he condemned Magee's tactics, Steffens acknowledged his enormous popularity.

"Chris, as he was called, was a charming character," Steffens wrote. "I have seen Pittsburgers grow black in the face denouncing the ring, but when I asked, 'What kind of a man was Magee?' they would cool and say, "Chris? Chris was one of the best men God ever made."

"So I must be careful," Steffens concluded. "Magee did not, technically speaking, rob the town. That was not his way, and it would be a carelessly unnecessary way in Pennsylvania. But surely he does not deserve a monument."

Edward Muller, a University of Pittsburgh history professor, said Magee was a classic machine boss who not only helped shape the city's growth when its industry and population were increasing rapidly, but also ensured his political future by taking care of the many new immigrants flowing into the region.

Like other machine leaders, Muller said, Magee figured out "that by providing minimal services like a turkey in the pot at Thanksgiving or a load of coal when it was freezing or jobs in contracting companies that paved the streets and put in lighting and sewers, he could in turn get the voters' undying political loyalty."

In the end, Muller said, Magee accomplished "a tremendous amount of building of the infrastructure at the time -- roads, sewers, gas, lighting, the parks system -- but on the other hand, it was done at a cost, a degree of inefficiency, a degree of corruption."

When he died, said another Pitt historian, Carolyn Carson, thousands of people lined the streets between Trinity Episcopal Church and Allegheny Cemetery, and women all along the route threw flowers and sometimes themselves onto the coffin.

Legacy in stone

At the time of his death, Magee's estate was valued at an estimated $5 million -- worth $123 million in today's money. He left the interest on it to support his wife, Eleanor, but after she died in 1909, the money and his family home in Oakland went toward establishing the hospital.

In his will, he specified that the hospital should provide "free and dignified care for the unwed mother," partly because he apparently had arranged such care for young women during his tenure, Carson said.

By the time Augustus Saint Gaudens received the commission for the Magee Memorial, he already was America's most famous sculptor and was a personal friend to many of the leading artists and politicians of the day, including Theodore Roosevelt, William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Adams, John Singer Sargent and Maxfield Parrish.

He is best known today for another bas-relief sculpture, the Shaw Memorial in Boston.

The memorial depicts the black soldiers of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment marching alongside their mounted leader, Robert Gould Shaw. Many of the Civil War unit's soldiers and Shaw himself died in the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina, which was depicted in the movie "Glory."

Other well-known Saint Gaudens sculptures include "The Pilgrim" in Philadelphia; the mounted statue of Sherman in Central Park in New York; the enigmatic seated woman of the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., and the standing statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park in Chicago, a miniature of which is displayed in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Born to a French father and Irish mother in Dublin, Saint Gaudens moved to New York as a child and had a rough-and-tumble existence as a boy before becoming an apprentice to cameo makers, where he first learned his sculpting skills.

While still a teenager, he sailed to Paris and began rigorous training as a sculptor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He then decamped to Rome for more study and work, where he met the woman he would marry, Augusta Homer, an American who was the first cousin of painter Winslow Homer.

He eventually returned to New York and set up a studio after getting his first major commission, a statue there of Civil War Adm. David Farragut in Madison Square.

At the time of the Magee commission, he had returned to America from Europe for the last time, because he was suffering from colon cancer. After surgery in Boston in 1900, he moved to Cornish and continued working, although he eventually grew so weak that his assistants would carry him to a chair on the porch of his home so he could direct some of the work from a distance.

Henry Duffy, curator of the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, said the Magee Memorial, in his opinion, "is a beautiful work, but I think it is largely unknown, and like everything else, there are only a handful of things by famous artists that get the most publicity, while other works don't get as much."

Saint Gaudens died before the memorial was complete, and it was finished by one of his longtime assistants, Henry Hering.

The Saint Gaudens family ended up having another connection with Pittsburgh. The sculptor's son, Homer, became director of the Carnegie Museum of Art for more than two decades, from the early 1920s to 1950, Duffy said.

The Magee family still has a presence in Pittsburgh, and there is even a Christopher Lyman Magee living today.

He is an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the great-grand-nephew of the memorial's Christopher Magee.

Magee, who earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, said "I used that bas-relief statue on occasion to let people learn how to spell my middle name, and I may have given some freshmen being hazed the assignment to find the statue."

"But I am glad you wrote to me," Magee said, "because I did not know that Saint Gaudens had done that work."