Harlem Monuments Spruced Up for Spring

Photographs by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

John Saunders, a monument conservation manager for the Parks Department, cleaned the Harriett Tubman monument at 123rd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

Four interns were climbing Harriet Tubman’s back clutching wax and rags, and a city conservationist hung around near her shoulders with a blow torch and can of lacquer. Tubman — or rather her towering bronze representation at 122nd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem — was getting her first makeover since being installed in 2007.The sculpture, officially titled “Swing Low,” a $2.8 million public commission by Alison Saar, was one of the first stops this summer for the city’s Monuments Conservation Program, a privately supported city endeavor to keep the more than 1,300 public monuments in New York looking good — even though some are more than a century old.
The Tubman monument was unveiled in 2007.

The work on the Tubman statue, which honors the antislavery activist and conductor of the Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s, took place on Thursday morning. It began with a thorough scrubbing, using a lather.

The Tubman monument was unveiled in 2007.

“It’s basically shampoo,” said Christine S. Djuric, a city monuments conservation manager overseeing the work.

After the bath, the interns went at the statue with their wax, while another project manager, John Saunders, worked the blow torch to remove moisture from the statue before applying a protective coating.

When the statue was first erected, the workers did not use enough finish, and Tubman was at risk of premature tarnish, Mr. Saunders said.

Such work is important; otherwise, Tubman might look like the bust of the Civil War general Winfield Scott Hancock, in Hancock Park, two blocks away: slightly bald.

On the Hancock statue, Ms. Djuric said there were “splotches of green” where the wax had come off. “We need to cover his bald spots,” she said.

At a time when city parks budgets are being trimmed, and the work force is stretched at the art and antiquities unit of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — which is charged with caring for public art — the Monument Conservation Program provides some extra relief.

“We’re in a hiring freeze as stringent as any I’ve experienced in 22 years working in parks,” said Jonathan Kuhn, director of art and antiquities for the city.

The program relies on private financing to pay for full-time conservationists and summer interns, with this year’s brood of budding conservationists paid for by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the benefactor Donna Karan.

While most new works of art given to the city include endowments to pay for their maintenance, sculptures like “Swing Low” were paid for with public money, and require the city to pay for their care over their lifespans — a worthy investment, considering many sculptures’ multimillion dollar price tag.

In the past, some public sculptures had gone neglected, including Harlem Hybrid, a 5,500-pound bronze piece on West 125th Street by the artist Richard Hunt, an acclaimed African-American sculptor. That piece, which was installed in 1976, became partly buried in the surrounding mulch, infested with rats, and overgrown by shrubbery, Mr. Kuhn said. It was only last year that the department was able to restore its luster.

Over the summer, the conservation program crew hopes to visit two or three statues per day.

Though some days, the work is harder than others. Like the extra work that went into making Harriet Tubman sparkle, despite the rain.

“It’s taking way longer than the two hours it would usually take,” said Vanja Vlahovic, 22, a program intern and Duke University graduate. “It’s the small things that can go wrong that take our time, like finding a water source.”

Several of the graduate interns, who are working for $11 an hour restoring New York’s outdoor museum pieces, are hoping to gain experience in preparation to apply to graduate school, and they are picking up some tricks along the way.

“You can almost tell where the statue is thirsty for wax a little bit,” said Elizabeth Cottrell, 24, a University of Vermont graduate who was applying a coat of wax along the hem of Harriet Tubman’s skirt.

John Saunders, of the Parks Department, cleaned a sculpture in Hancock Park, at 123rd Street and Manhattan Avenue.

Source: [NYT CITYROOM]