Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll go inside a renovation of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn. We’ll also get details on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement in the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary.
The imposing arch at the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn — officially the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch — needed attention in places the public never sees.
An inch or two of water gurgled beneath the tiles on the roof. Wetland grass sprouted and thrived.
Inside, there were signs of stress from the weight of the familiar statues on top of the monument. And one of the circular staircases had pulled away from the wall it had been anchored to.
Now, the water has been siphoned off, the grass has been removed, and a new roof has been installed.
So have new drainage pipes that run down the inside of the monument and discharge rainwater directly into the sewer system.
The staircase has been cleaned and reattached. The walls that were under stress, in what is known as the trophy room, have been reinforced with diagonal lines of bricks.
There has also been work in places you can see, though you might not notice what is different. Where mortar had to be replaced, the new mortar was mixed with cement from the same part of upstate New York as the original. Where stonework was cracked or broken, the new stone came from a quarry in Maine not far from the one that provided the original granite in the 1890s.
The renovation was paid for with $8.9 million allocated when Bill de Blasio was mayor. The work was carried out by the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit group that manages the park. Separately, the Department of Parks and Recreation has cleaned and restored the statues on the roof.
“It’s the main grand entrance to the park,” said Morgan Monaco, who as president of the alliance is the administrator of the park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed it, “focused on the park being completely accessible to the common person and that person having this dramatic experience of coming in from one of the busiest intersections into this beautiful open expanse,” she said. “The arch is the centerpiece. It plays a significant role in saying you’re arrived.”
Grand Army Plaza, laid out as the formal entrance to Prospect Park, needed something grander when it opened in 1867, and in the late 1880s, work began on the arch. It was designed by John H. Duncan, the architect of Grant’s Tomb in Manhattan. The alliance says it was considered Brooklyn’s Arc de Triomphe.
The arch, too, evolved. Duncan designed it without its most distinctive feature, the groupings of statues by the renowned Beaux-Arts sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. MacMonnies was a Brooklyn-born prodigy who was said to have completed his first statue, of George Washington on horseback, at age 5. (The medium was not marble or granite but chewing gum.)
He was approaching 30 and living in Paris when he received the commission for the figures for the arch. Poor Duncan: To accommodate the statues, he had to cover the skylights he had designed for the trophy room, a 44-foot-long space that had been intended to display relics from the Civil War, but apparently never did.
The arch underwent its first big restoration in 1940, and steel reinforcements were added in the 1950s. By the 1970s, it had become another symbol of New York City’s decline: MacMonnies’s allegorical figure of Columbia, the imposing statue representing the United States, fell from her chariot and dangled from the roof until firefighters rescued her. That prompted a renovation a few years later, and a preservation program began in 1999. But the roof failed in the early 2000s.
Stepping inside the arch was once like stepping into a ruin. There is an eeriness to the bare brick walls as you climb the stairs. But now the railings shine, and the alliance says the structure is watertight. Two giant fans were installed to draw off moisture and humidity, just in case.
Monaco said that the arch was a tribute to rank-and-file soldiers and sailors who fought in the Civil War, not to one of the generals who commanded them (although Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman dedicated it). “The arch represents the people who gave their lives to the idea of America as part of the Civil War and believed in the power of creating a unified country,” she said. “And, of course, abolishing slavery.”
Weather
It will be partly sunny, with a high of 85 degrees and a chance of afternoon showers and thunderstorms. At night, it will be mostly cloudy with a low of 66 and a chance of rain.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended until Sunday for Eid al-Adha.
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After the mayoral debate: Ocasio-Cortez endorses Mamdani
The morning after a chaotic debate among the candidates hoping to win the Democratic nomination for mayor, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement was perhaps the most significant move yet to push progressives into a single lane to block former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s return to power. Cuomo remains the probable front-runner in the June 24 primary, followed by Mamdani.
Ocasio-Cortez said that Cuomo “belongs to the hedge funds,” while Mamdani had “put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers that is the strongest to lead the pack.” She said that with the ranked-choice voting system in the primary, she would list Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, second, and Brad Lander, the city comptroller, third, followed by Scott Stringer, a former comptroller, and State Senator Zellnor Myrie.
My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that her endorsement has the potential to shape the race in its final weeks. But the endorsement could also motivate Cuomo’s supporters, who frequently blame Ocasio-Cortez and others in the party’s left wing for alienating middle-of-the-road voters. Cuomo has lined up endorsements from most labor unions and has the support of other U.S. representatives from Queens, Harlem and the Bronx.
As for the debate, it was unclear whether it would make much of a difference in the campaign.
Cuomo appeared exasperated and dismissive as the other candidates assailed his record, portraying him as a Trump-adjacent friend of big-money moguls and as someone had not lived in New York City for years before he decided to run for mayor.
President Trump and his attacks on immigrants and universities loomed over the debate. So did Mayor Eric Adams, who opted out of the Democratic primary and will run as an independent in the general election. Several of the Democratic candidates have highlighted what federal prosecutors described as a quid pro quo in which the federal government would drop corruption charges against Adams in return for his cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown.
METROPOLITAN diary
Pretty Fast in Pink
Dear Diary:
I was standing at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street. The blinking “walk” sign indicated four seconds left to cross.
Tired and somewhat defeated after a long day, I thought to myself: I’m not going to rush this time.
Just then, a tall woman dressed in pink from head to toe, with pink nails, heels, sunglasses and cowboy hat to match, slapped me on the back.
“We got this!” she said.
We darted across the avenue together and high-fived when we got to the other side.
— Nick Trepanier
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Luke Carmanico, Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A Brooklyn Monument Gets a Mostly Invisible Makeover appeared first on New York Times.
