The city’s parks department on Thursday unveiled a $8.9 million restoration of the famed arch at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza that’s been in the works for seven years — the first major rehabilitation of the Civil War monument in nearly 50 years.
The Prospect Park Alliance, in partnership with the city’s Parks Department, revitalized the 133-year-old, landmarked Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch with funds initially allocated by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2018. Work to clean and repair the weather-worn structure didn’t get underway until May 2023, partially due to Covid-19-related delays. It wasn’t until this spring that crews at last completed the two-year project to replace the arch’s roof, remove years of grime on the exterior granite and refinish the monument’s intricate bronze statues.
The project team had decades of maintenance to catch up on. And since the original designs for the 1892 monument (which honors soldiers who fought with the Union during the Civil War) were lost to time, the Prospect Park Alliance “did a sort of x-ray for buildings” to survey the condition of the structure buried under the stone and concrete, said David Yum, the director of architecture and preservation at the Prospect Park Alliance, in an interview.
Over decades, moisture had penetrated five layers deep into the structure. It took eight months of blasting huge, industrial-strength fans and using specialized chemicals to dry out the materials so that they could be patched up and the roof could be resealed, said Yum. Workers also reinforced the historic structure with steel beams and created a new internal drainage system to minimize future water damage. The project also revitalized cast-iron spiral staircases inside the structure, which are only accessible by free city Urban Park Ranger tours.
For the exterior, the project team focused on cleaning stains, repairing weather damage to the granite facade and repointing all of the structure’s joints. But they purposefully did not add any sort of weather-resistant treatment to the stone.
“We didn’t put any sort of protective coating on because that tends to injure the stone in the long run and it alters its appearance,” said Yum. “There is no super coating where we can forget about it for 50 years.”
The Arch was landmarked in 1975, when the structure was in severe disrepair. In fact, in 1976, the monument’s most prominent statue, of a woman riding a chariot led by four horses, was in such poor shape that it fell from the chariot. Outcry over the dilapidated condition of the monument at the time led to a major city restoration and the creation of a community group that eventually developed into the Prospect Park Alliance.
“Regular maintenance is the absolutely best solution to deterioration,” said Yum. “In the end, it’s like anything you treasure, you have to regularly maintain it.”
