A tiny, relatively unknown squad of park workers is charged with the maintenance of New York City’s most celebrated monuments— and they’re running out of time.
These six people are the sole custodians of the city’s modest yet powerful Monuments Conservation Program, and they’re racing to finish all the essential outdoor work before the cold sets in.
“There’s a lot of work to do,” public‑art conservator and team lead John Saunders told The Post.
The Parks Department crew must clean and repair more than 800 monuments that routinely suffer from weathering, pigeon droppings, car exhaust, and vandalism. “It’s not just bronze or statuary – the collection includes things like the Unisphere, the Washington Square Arch and modern pieces,” Saunders added, mentioning a recent three‑person expedition to Grand Army Plaza’s Bailey Fountain where they used blowtorches.
That fountain is one of the 250+ sculptures under the team’s care. Each local bronze work, including the fountain, receives an annual cleaning and a fresh wax coating to ward off acid rain and exhaust corrosion, the 19‑year‑old Parks veteran explained.
“The finish they’re putting on now helps protect and stabilize it,” Saunders said about the ancient‑Greek‑inspired fountain, which had just had loose stones replaced earlier that month after workers warned that they were “so undercut” they could topple the century‑old piece.
The group has kept a detailed monthly schedule since the program began in the 1990s, usually tackling sites in the same month as an anniversary, birthday or holiday. For instance, many of the city’s 275 war memorials were refreshed before Veterans Day ceremonies.
The team also plans precisely for locations that share a date, such as the Flight 587 Memorial in Belle Harbor, Queens, and Chinatown’s Dr. Sun Yat‑sen Monument in Manhattan—both marked on November 12—making sure they’re especially polished in time for related observances.
“We want to avoid cycles of neglect and revival. … We want to solve small problems before they become big problems, like water getting in and causing stones to fall apart,” Kuhn said.
The crew keeps plenty of matching paint and stone pieces ready for touch‑ups. While a typical cleaning might only take a few hours, some projects can extend to an entire month on a single site.
Apart from a baseline $750,000 maintenance budget, the team draws on dedicated endowment funds for individual monuments— and Saunders claims the group actually saves taxpayers money through preventive work. “We save the city money,” he said, as routine repairs prevent costly disasters or large capital projects. “We keep things looking good.”
Major restorations this year cut across decades and styles, from reviving the 1970s Bronx art installation Puerto Rican Sun— which had shut down in 2024 after a section broke off and fell— to a complete overhaul of Bronx’s Victory Memorial Park, courtesy of $85,000 in donated services, and repair of the Kimlau Memorial Arch in Chinatown, which has suffered years of cracking columns.
The winter season gives the Parks team a chance to tend to other cultural artifacts such as 1700s Dutch gravestones, cannons, and carousel figures. Smaller jobs on the docket this winter include fixing a bent 1910s plaque and restoring a vandalized lion’s head spout, both of which will be handled in the department’s repair shops.
Some of the largest repairs—like the multi‑year restoration of the Grand Army Plaza Arch—are too massive or too remote to tackle annually. These projects call for help from summer apprentices, and interns last year lifted a 10‑story iron cage to polish the historic horses atop the 134‑year‑old Grand Army icon. This year, interns completed a full restoration of the George Washington equestrian sculpture at Continental Army Plaza and repainted parts of the massive modernist sculpture Shadows and Flags in the Financial District.
“They’re out learning how to hot wax, stone masonry work, cleaning and repair work,” Saunders said. “We take care of so many different things.”
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