Facials for Stone Statues: On the Job With New York’s Monuments Doctors

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On a muggy and overcast summer day, a team of interns and their supervisor are working in as breezy a space as you can find: a hundred feet in the air, overlooking Grand Army Plaza and Prospect Park.

As joggers run by, few take notice of the people with spray cans harnessed onto the arch’s iconic bronze horses, 10 stories up.

Their day starts at 7 a.m., when they’re strapped into a lift that carries them up. At the top, intern Abigail Lenhard grabbed a can of lacquer used to protect the bronze from further weather erosion and refinish the horses to give them an even deep green shine, something which fades over time. She reached a spot her colleague lower down couldn’t quite get.

“One of the questions we ask when we interview people for the summer program is ‘Are you afraid of heights?’ And if they say yes, this may not be the role for them,” said Jonathan Kuhn, director of art and antiquities and the head of the Monuments Conservation Program at the Parks Department.

In the course of the summer, the small team of interns — with backgrounds in fine arts and art restoration — work to keep New York’s more than 800 monuments from becoming ruins.

The Conservation Program, since its founding in 1997, mentored and trained the next generation of conservationists through a 12-week, hands-on summer internship program. The program was originally funded by the Florence Gould Foundation with a three-year grant and has continued running since due to a combination of corporate and individual private funding.

When Kuhn first started working in the department, most projects were intensive restoration jobs dealing with monuments which had fallen into disrepair. These days, the projects are mostly about upkeep.

“It’s like a facial,” says Kuhn about the work the team does. “You’re drawing out the impurities embedded beneath the surface, rather than driving them further into the stone.”

The work varies. Some of the jobs are what they call “wash and wax” jobs, meant to maintain the monuments already in good condition. Other shorter term jobs include removing graffiti, like removing tagging at the Washington Square Arch.

Other jobs are more intense, like replacing a nose for Christopher Columbus in The Bronx, or remaking General Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s sword in Brooklyn.

New York City is home to monuments from the beginning of the city’s colonial history all the way to the modern art pieces dedicated in the last few years. For Kuhn, these monuments and sculptures act like cultural guideposts, both commemorating specific moments in the city’s history and telling modern audiences what New Yorkers in previous centuries found important.

“They sort of function as a message from the past, and how that gets interpreted can change over time,” said Kuhn. “As a monument doctor, my job is to keep them there so that people can come and gather what they will from it.”

A veteran restorer, conservation manager John Saunders declines to take sides on recent debates over whether certain monuments should be taken down.

“If they bring me the patient, I’ll fix it,” said Saunders. “I don’t decide what happens to the patient.”

Since the program’s inception in 1997, 139 apprentices have gone through the program. Many of them end up doing conservation work at some of the country’s most established museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum and the Smithsonian, according to the Parks Department.

One former intern, Kayla Abaza, stayed on the team and is now one of four full-time staffers on the conservation program.

An underrated part of the job, Abaza says, is finding the obscure food spots all over the city, as their work takes them to all five boroughs, from Laurelton on the eastern end of Queens to Riverdale in the northernmost part of The Bronx.

“This job attracts the kind of person who wants to do this line of work but aren’t 100% set on sitting in a basement all day.”

The role, for obvious reasons, also suits those who love New York City history. Thomas Creighton, one of this year’s four interns, has loved getting to know his city’s history through what its past citizens chose to memorialize.

“It’s interesting to see what’s in the public imagination at the time,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to get a monument put up, so clearly these things mattered to people.”

Though these monuments embody specific moments in New York history, Kuhn thinks their meanings also evolve with every new generation that interacts with it. For example, says Kuhn, Bailey Fountain at Grand Army Plaza, was named and dedicated for its funder, philanthropist and financier Frank Bailey.

“When people come up to this statue, they see this wild and extravagant Neptune and Triton and Adam and Eve, and they take their prom photos and their wedding picture in front of it,” said Kuhn. “They’re not responding to it in terms of thinking about who Mr. Bailey was.”

One of Lenhard’s most memorable moments from the summer so far was from her second day on the job — when a man yelled at her about the condition of the parks.

Once she explained the team’s role was solely focused on monuments, not ground maintenance, his tone changed. Suddenly, he was thanking the team for the work they do and apologizing for his earlier tone.

“While we were briefly being berated, at the heart of it was a community member who wants to see his parks operating to the best of their condition, someone who genuinely cares for and encourages his parks to be the best they can be,” said Lenhard.

“Overall, that episode is charming to me because I hope people care about their parks and community advocacy is a huge part of that.”

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