It seemed wrong and it was—just not the way I thought

On Wednesday June 18th, the day before David W. Dunlap’s article, “A Gilded Monument Is Mysteriously Shedding Its Brand-New Gold” appeared in The New York Times, I was riding in a bus down Fifth Avenue and passed the regilded William Tecumseh Sherman monument glittering in the sunlight. There was something wrong about it. It looked garish and harsh—not at all like the understated monument I had gotten used to seeing over the years. And there was something wrong with it—just not what I perceived. It was shedding its recently applied gilding. Something went terribly wrong in the gilding process and the gold leaf did not properly adhere to the sculpture.