City conservators undertook the tall task of preserving a pair of heralded sculptures at Cadman Plaza Park with painstaking detail as part of a restoration program to reclaim the handsome limestone statues from the ravages of time.
Using a high-range lift, members and trainees of the Citywide Monuments Conservation Program cleaned the colossal high-relief figures of a warrior and mother and child at the Brooklyn War Memorial, Tillary Street near Pineapple Walk, by carefully removing encrustations and soil and organic deposits in addition to strengthening the stone carvings with special chemicals.
The monument is the only one of its kind, dedicated to the 327,000 Brooklyn men and women who served in World War II.
The conservation was literally far-reaching – each of the statues flanking the monument are 24 feet in height and were said to be the tallest sculptures in all of New York City at the time of the memorial’s dedication on November 12, 1951.
Their sculptor, Charles Keck, is also known for Father Duffy (1936) in Times Square, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial (1950) on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn’s own Sixty-First District Memorial (1922) in Greenwood Playground.
Since 1997, the Citywide Monuments Conservation Program has refurbished 46 sculptures and monuments in addition to performing numerous maintenance projects in New York City parks.
