How Two 1,800-Pound Statues Were Lifted Into a Midtown Office

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out what a crane, two statues and a street closing had to do with one another. We’ll also get details on Mayor Eric Adams’s first public appearance since his spokesman said on social media that the mayor had not been “feeling his best lately.”

“Somebody asked if something bad happened, because they have the street blocked off,” Jennifer Scott said, standing outside the office building on Broadway where she works for a nonprofit called Rising Ground.

The block, between West 35th Street and West 36th Street, was indeed closed to traffic. The Empire State Building gleamed high in the distance, but the street was dark as Wednesday gave way to Thursday. People walked around in reflective vests, and vehicles were double-parked where, most of the time, only emergency vehicles would dare double-park.

But they weren’t emergency vehicles. Nothing bad had happened. What was going on was just one of those things that happen from time to time in the middle of the night in New York. Something large and heavy was about to be moved into an office building — specifically, two 1,800-pound statues that belong to Rising Ground.

They were too heavy for the elevator, so they had to go up on a crane — actually, a boom truck parked on the street. Riggers and workers from a company that specializes in gravestones for cemeteries would slide them through a window and into Rising Ground’s office on the eighth floor. The street had been closed as a precaution.

Upstairs, Rising Ground’s chief executive, Alan Mucatel, stood in the strikingly colorful office. “I feel like we’re birthing a baby,” he said as one of the statues wiggled through the window.

Rising Ground, a social service organization that has contracts with the city and the state for more than 100 family and children’s services programs, has occupied the space on the eighth floor since last summer. But its lineage goes back 194 years, to its founding in Lower Manhattan as the Leake and Watts Orphan House.

Mucatel has presided over major changes in the last few years. The organization changed its name to Rising Ground in 2018, and it also absorbed another large foster care agency, Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families. Then, in 2022, it sold its 40-acre campus in Yonkers, N.Y., which it had occupied since the 1890s. The grounds were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park.

Mucatel wanted to bring along some history when Rising Ground moved to Manhattan. He wanted the statues, which had been outdoors for 130 years. He had the architects who designed the new office create spaces where they could go. The staff had full-size cardboard cutouts of the statues made and put them in place until the actual statues arrived.

One of the statues was of the Watts of the group’s former name — John Watts Jr., a former congressman. The other was of his friend John George Leake, a wealthy New York lawyer who died in 1827. Watts used money from Leake’s estate to start the orphanage at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan four years later.

The sculptor was George Edwin Bissell, chosen by Watts’s grandson, John Watts de Peyster. The Watts statue was placed in the churchyard at Trinity, where notables like Alexander Hamilton and Clement Clarke Moore (who wrote the “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem) are buried. Scott said the Watts statue is the only statue there.

Bissell liked the statue so much that he asked de Peyster if he could make a copy for the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893. De Peyster not only said yes; he paid for it. After the exposition, de Peyster wrote to the orphanage, suggesting that the duplicate go to Yonkers. Scott said the Leake statue was probably fabricated around the same time, but the historical record is scant.

Moving two larger-than-life statues to Manhattan presented problems. Rising Ground considered slicing each statue in half. The building’s freight elevator could have handled them that way, but after ordering up some 3-D mapping, Rising Ground decided that the risk of damage was too great. The boom truck was the only way.

Watts came through the window feet first. “Here’s John,” Mucatel said after referring to Watts as the “tall, skinny guy.” Leake, by contrast, looked somewhat less trim.

Mucatel said he had also wanted to move another relic from the Yonkers campus, an old safe that was apparently designed to be burglar-proof. The key had been lost.

“We had it broken open in the hope we’d find something,” he said.

But the result was the same as when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s secret vault in an ill-fated prime time television special decades ago.

“Nothing,” Mucatel said.

Weather

Expect rain most of the day, with a high in the mid-40s. In the evening, rain and cloudy conditions will continue, with the temperature dipping into the mid-30s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect through Feb. 12 (Lincoln’s Birthday).

The latest New York news

Congestion pricing: The Trump administration is considering a move to halt New York City’s recently implemented program. An opponent of congestion pricing, former Representative Marc Molinaro, is expected to head the federal agency that distributes billions of dollars in grants for mass transit systems.
“A working parent’s worst nightmare”: A husband and wife who ran a day care center in Queens were charged with abusing toddlers. The couple pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted assault and endangering the welfare of a child.
A blue goodbye: After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good this Sunday.

Old school cool: Three years after starting the Luddite Club, meant to fight social media’s grip on young people, many original members are holding firm and gaining new converts.

Adams returns to the spotlight

Mayor Eric Adams ended several days of a self-enforced quarantine, appearing in public for the first time this week and striking a combative tone in a half-hour speech at an interfaith breakfast. He only briefly mentioned the health issues that his office said had kept him out of public view.

“Last week was a scary week for me, I’m not going to lie,” he said, without elaborating.

He also brushed aside talk that he was looking to leave City Hall.

“Who started this stupid rumor that I’m resigning on Friday?” he said.

The mystery over the mayor’s health was overshadowed by the news that senior officials under President Trump had talked with prosecutors in Manhattan about abandoning the corruption case against Adams. The officials have also spoken to Adams’s defense team, which is led by Alex Spiro, the personal lawyer for Elon Musk, the billionaire who is one of Trump’s closest advisers.

Trump, who said last month that Adams had been treated “pretty unfairly,” has the power to pardon Adams. But if prosecutors dismissed the case entirely, Adams could insist on his innocence as he campaigns for a second term. Trump would also avoid issuing a pardon that many might consider unwarranted.

Word of the discussions gave rise to questions, including whether the Justice Department would pressure prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop the charges. Spiro said in court papers last month that the prosecutors — who brought the five-count indictment against Adams last fall — had presented more evidence to a grand jury, a sign that new charges might be in the works.

Another question was how these developments would affect the race for mayor. Of several progressive candidates who have already thrown their hats in the ring, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, is considered a front-runner because he’s been elected to citywide office and has raised the most money after Adams. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo could join the race, but his base and Adams’s overlap. If Adams is no longer under a cloud, Cuomo might decide to sit this one out.

METROPOLITAN diary