Many museums have sculpture gardens filled with works donated or commissioned for museum display, but the Brooklyn Museum’s Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden is different. Everything in it was made to be seen, but not in a museum.
Rescued from the now-abandoned Art Deco Coney Island Fire Service pumping station. Below it, a 1918 park bench from the Coney Island boardwalk.
Scattered in a garden and mounted on walls, the Museum’s collection shows pieces meant to be artistic and inspiring, but nonetheless part of a more mundane urban view: Cornice elements from vanished buildings. Statues that once held pediments on their heads. Teams of horses that once guarded a fire pumping station, and even a pillar that once helped hold up Penn Station.
Progress is progress, but sometimes it’s also sanctioned vandalism, especially where no landmarks protection exists. I refer not only to the destruction of the beautiful Penn Station, modeled on Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, but the fact that this statue of Night that once adorned its facade had to be rescued from an ash dump in New Jersey. Day, sadly, has disappeared.
This ‘Lady Liberty’ spent 80 years on top of Manhattan’s Liberty Warehouse.
The Museum has done us all a service in showing these representative samples—but how sad to think of all the equally worthy pieces that are just gone, lost or destroyed. Ironically, many of them come from buildings that would almost certainly, in our time, have had better treatment, including Penn Station.
This lion, originally one of three, is from a 1902 German-built carousel that ran for years at Coney Island, and is now still in service in Japan. The dragon below is from a building in the Financial District.
These figures are ‘atlantes,’ named for Atlas, who carried the sky on his shoulders as they once carried the pediment of a mansion on theirs. The mansion, at 813 Fifth Avenue, belonged to paper magnate Hugh Chisholm, and was torn down in 1961.
Another bench, from another park, and another view of the four horses that once guarded the entrance of the Coney Island Pumping Station of the fire department. The station was built to provide high-pressure water for fighting amusement park fires. Abandoned for many years, the horses were removed to avoid vandalism. As our clue for the One-Clue Mystery, George G spotted them and their history.
These keystones are from the Park Lane Hotel, demolished in 1966. The hotel was on Fifth Avenue, where Citibank’s glass headquarters is now.
A Gallery of rescued architectural elements hangs on a garden wall.
On the other side of the museum, not in the garden but mounted on the facade itself, are two real rescued treasures by Daniel Chester French, better known as the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial.
The allegorical sculptures of Manhattan (upper) and Brooklyn (lower) used to adorn pillars at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, connecting the two boroughs. They came to the museum when the bridge was altered for more traffic.
The Brooklyn Museum, by the way, is one of New York’s secrets. In almost any other city, it would be among the top attractions, but in New York, even a great museum with an internationally-known collection of Egyptian materials and strong collections in many other fields can be off the radar just because it’s in Brooklyn. And, it’s next-door to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Prospect Park, and faces historic Eastern Parkway. Worth a visit!
And right now, it’s hosting one of the largest exhibits ever of the work and life of Frida Kahlo.
