I was struck by how little the city seems to value the labor of its Monuments Crew.
One crisp October morning, I encountered a monument on fire. First, I felt the heat. Then I saw the flames, which were mostly blue, and, in the light of day, nearly invisible. The monument in question was built in 1921 as a tribute to soldiers from my neighborhood in Brooklyn who had lost their lives in World War I. It stands in the center of Carroll Park, perpetually surrounded by the happy chaos of screaming children. The kids and their parents don’t really seem to notice it, except as something to climb or sit on. This was true on the morning of my October encounter, despite the fact that a man in a cherry picker was bathing the monument in fire. He was wearing a Parks Department uniform and armed with what appeared to be a flame thrower. Eventually he took a break, and I approached him to ask some questions. He told me he was part of a small team of monument cleaners in charge of conserving the city’s public statuary: he and his colleagues rotate through the parks and public squares of the five boroughs each year, ensuring that every monument stays fresh, and—crucially—legible. If not for their interventions, the words and images that give these monuments meaning would disappear and erode beneath layers of bird shit, insect shit, pollution, and grime. He saw himself as a caretaker for these structures and for the stories they tell. I asked him if he would want to be interviewed for an article. He told me he didn’t have any more to say.
As a researcher of memorials, I wondered why I had never studied this method – or any method – for cleaning monumental statuary. Why had I assumed that memorials made of metal and stone simply last forever, impervious to the forces of corrosion and decay? Was this a blind spot for other scholars in my field, or just for me? I started searching through digital libraries and scholarly databases, hoping to find some interrogation of the conservation process I had just witnessed in all its fiery glory. No dice. Other searches yielded one item of interest: an expired “City Park Worker Monuments Crew” job listing on nyc.gov. The listing included no educational or professional experience requirements, and its posted salary amounted to 50% of an annual living wage for a single adult in New York City. Reading the listing, I was struck by how little the city seems to value the labor of its Monuments Crew. I was also stunned by the invisibility of that labor within the scholarly discourse surrounding “memory workers,” a category that includes the artists and architects who design memorials, as well as the curators, archivists, historians, and other professionals responsible for the preservation and interpretation of historical memory. What would it mean to cultivate more appreciation and visibility for monuments crews and their labor within our communities and conversations? What would it look like to reach toward that goal on their terms and in service of their priorities?
Months later, I crossed paths with Elle Acebo-Hermiller, a conservator with experience cleaning statues like the one in Carroll Park. Elle cut her teeth at the Toledo Museum of Art, and her experience there involved using similar techniques to clean and protect similar objects. Elle walked me through each step of that process. “For most outdoor bronze sculptures, you’re using what’s called hot wax technique,” she said. “When the bronze sculpture is finished, it has to be heated and coated in this hot wax, which is usually a proprietary blend of waxes and polymers. It has to be melted onto the metal to adhere. Somebody has to go and get the torch out and heat up the metal.” Elle, who has a tendency to speak with her hands, mimicked the act of blowtorching. Thinking back to my brief conversation with the man in the cherry picker, I asked how she might approach a statue caked in pigeon droppings. “For those, we would have to scrub it with soap and water first, dry it, and then do the heat,” she said. “You’re basically burning off the old wax, and then you have a hockey puck of new wax that you’re rubbing on real fast, while it’s still hot.” I realized that, for me, the safety considerations of working with propane torches had been overshadowed by the visual drama of a phoenix-like monument rising from the flames. Elle brought me down to earth. “We are all naturally afraid of fire,” she said, remembering her early days at the Toledo Museum of Art. “We had the quick-and-dirty safety lesson, we were always wearing the heat-proof leather gloves, we always had our safety protocol.” As an additional precaution, Elle and her colleagues always worked in teams of at least two people. “One person has to hold the torch, and the other person is applying wax,” she explained. “We’re not doing both with two hands, because rushing that is a good way to accidentally burn yourself.” I thought of the man in Carroll Park, who had been wearing thin plastic gloves and had been working alone.
I asked Elle about the people who take on this kind of work, and she explained that the professionalized discipline of conservation is still relatively young, stretching back a hundred years or so. “Prior to that point, repairs and restoration work was often done by auction houses or collectors themselves… [or] municipal employees,” she said. Today, many conservators pursue expensive postgraduate degrees and gain hands-on experience through museum internships before going on to hold prestigious positions at cultural institutions. Others, like the members of the New York City Monuments Crew, perform the same labor for close to minimum wage. Elle speculated that job listings like the one I found on nyc.gov might be cultural holdovers from the “pre-conservation time,” when tasks like monument preservation were equated with janitorial work. “There’s so much of collections management and collections care that does feel like janitorial work,” she mused. “A lot of it is pest management, dusting.” From Elle’s perspective, museum-trained conservators are maintenance workers, and municipal maintenance workers are conservators. While critiquing the disparity in pay that sets these roles apart from one another—a disparity that might explain the absence of conservation language from the Monuments Crew job listing—Elle otherwise spoke about these occupations as one and the same. Speaking about his labor with the respectful familiarity of a peer and colleague, Elle consistently referred to the man I had met in Carroll Park as a conservator. This article follows her lead.
In Elle’s view, invisibility remains a key principle of conservation work, valued both by conservators with postgraduate degrees and by those with no degrees. “The intention is to be as invisible and seamless with the original work as possible,” she said, describing the prevailing ethos of conservation work writ large. “Like, my work on this should not be visible. It shouldn’t get in the way of the original piece, or the intent of the piece, or, how it translates to now.” Elle pointed out the quixotic nature of this philosophy: “It is this really weird catch-22, because you wouldn’t get to have it be relevant now, if it wasn’t for decades of work by conservationists,” she said. “However, it’s like, My contributions to that should not be visible whatsoever. A lot of conservators are very extreme introverts and are just like, Don’t see me.” Listening to Elle, I began to understand why the conservator I had met in Carroll Park hadn’t attracted more attention from my neighbors, and why he hadn’t wanted to be interviewed; remaining inconspicuous while mounting a cherry picker and wielding a propane torch is something of an art, requiring practice and intentionality. I was also less surprised that scholars in my field have struggled to recognize the critical role that conservators play in the life cycle of memorials. When the field of conservation strives for invisibility, it also limits the impact this work can have on communities and on scholarship.
Memorials would not last long without the interventions of conservators. I asked Elle how many years it would take for an untended monument to lose all legibility, and she estimated as little as three years. A statue situated under a low-hanging tree at the Toledo Museum of Art provided an extreme example of this rapid degradation. “There were lots of spider webs on it, [and] there were ants in this boulder that acted as its platform,” she said. “Three years, and it would start getting pretty damaged if we weren’t taking care of the ants, bugs, bird poop, all the stuff that starts to build up.” Since stone and metal monuments are susceptible to corrosion, prolonged neglect can leave a lasting mark. “Where your corrosion is mostly coming from is… things that have acids in them, which will eventually work their way though the coating,” Elle explained. “All of that environmental stuff will eventually ruin the statue.” Monuments placed in ideal locations (away from trees and protected from exposure to road salt, birds, and insects) can last longer without care and attention, but ultimately, the outcome remains the same without the labor of conservators. In Elle’s words, “It is a matter of decades and something would be completely unrecognizable, even if it’s in a very perfect spot.”
I suppose I had assumed that memorials built from so-called permanent materials—metal and stone—could take care of themselves for the most part. Paintings and textile-based artworks, by contrast, seemed the constant subject of preservation and conservation. “People really love the big, dramatic transformation of cleaning a painting,” Elle said, seemingly reading my mind. “But paintings are one of those things that don’t need to be cleaned very frequently. They can go decades upon decades, or hundreds of years even, without anybody touching it, and it’s mostly fine. But there are much more delicate things that have to be just cleaned constantly or it becomes kind of unrecognizable.” Despite everything she had said about metal and stone’s vulnerability to natural decay, I was thrown by Elle’s use of the term “delicate.” After all, stone monuments of classical antiquity and neolithic prehistory remain present in today’s landscapes. “There is good reason for thinking stone is impervious to everything,” Elle said, sympathetically. “I think of Stonehenge. It’s been there since pre-history. But it’s not undamaged. It’s not how it was when it was made…we don’t know how much of it is missing and lost to time.” Popular perceptions about the unchangeability of stone and metal might be less rooted in logic than in emotion. People want to believe in their ability to leave a permanent mark on the landscape by making things with metal and stone. Those who dedicate gravestones to loved ones, for instance, rarely welcome the transience of those memorials.
Processes of corrosion and decay are particularly high-stakes for commemorative structures, since many are created with the express purpose of enduring in perpetuity. In the words of American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget.” For generations, these twin objectives—always remembering and never forgetting— have served as the primary goals for most American monuments and memorials and as the yardsticks used to gauge their achievements. These objectives would be unreachable without the labor of conservators, who preserve and protect these sites and their meanings for future generations.
Increasing the visibility of the labor behind monument conservation could have the added benefit of enhancing the visibility of commemorative structures themselves. Monuments have a tendency to blend into the background and deflect public attention. In her book Blunt Instruments, Kristin Hass describes how monuments can gradually “stop being noticeable” and “seem to fit seamlessly into the landscape.” While Hass’s research focuses on harmful and oppressive memorials—those that normalize doctrines of militarism and white supremacy—her point arguably holds true for more benign memorials, which have the potential to foster solidarity in communities, help grieving people heal, and otherwise benefit the people whose lives they touch. Over time, such memorials often become invisible to the communities they were created to serve, especially as time passes and new generations with different perspectives inherit public spaces.
Combining the process of conservation with ceremonial activations of these sites could engage both public and scholarly audiences, enhancing the visibility of conservation practices and commemorative structures at the same time. Elle and I imagined what such activations might look like. Each year, the conservation process at Carroll Park could be transformed into a public event—or a series of public events—revisiting the stories and meanings behind the monument and their relevance to the challenges and traumas of the present moment. Through talks and workshops in Carroll Park, historians could shed light on the stories behind the names on the memorial. Activists could speak to the parallels between the needless violence of WWI and present-day military conflictsfinal d. The conservation process could accompany a ceremonial reading of names. Arguably, the act of setting a memorial on fire lends itself to public ceremony: the burning away of old wax a powerful visual metaphor for letting go of outdated meanings and interpretations of commemorative sites, the burnishing of these structures anew reflecting the creation of new forms of storytelling and question-asking that bring memorials to life as productive sites of memory, healing, and renewal.
At first blush, some conservators might be skeptical of incorporating conservation practices into ceremonial community activations of monuments and memorials. “I do think that there are definitely conservators who would be like, Oh my god, I do not want people to watch me,” Elle said, with a thoughtful expression on her face. “If you were to do this frequently or in the longer term, you would need docents to be there, to answer questions and to not overwhelm your conservator.” Elle and I kept talking for another twenty minutes, mulling over various strategies and programming possibilities for counteracting the invisibility of conservators and memorials alike. While that conversation may not have generated a foolproof plan ready for implementation in Carroll Park, it did get us both excited about what collaboration between conservators and scholars can look like. Such conversations have the potential to change the way communities relate to the monuments that fill their parks and public spaces. They can shed light on possibilities for collaborative practices that center the needs and priorities of conservators while serving communities, enrich our understanding of our collective past, and deepen public appreciation for the labor that sustains our public memory.
Speaking with Elle—and with the conservator in Carroll Park—taught me to see this particular memorial in a new light. I now find myself looking more closely at the names that adorn its surface, knowing the care and skill required to maintain their legibility. As the seasons change, I notice the accumulation dust and droppings that obscure those names. Chances are slim that I’ll witness the conservation process again this year, but October has once again arrived in Carroll Park, and I look forward to the conservator’s arrival. Any day now, I’ll pass by the memorial and all the debris will be gone, burned away in the heat of a blue flame.
Charlotte Juergens is a Ph.D. candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she specializes in memory studies and museum studies; she also serves as the Shelby White & Leon Levy Director of Public History at The Green-Wood Cemetery and maintains an active creative practice directing documentary films. In her spare time, Charlotte can be found prowling the parks and public gardens of New York City searching for snails to keep as pets!
Article photo: The Fall of Atlantis via Public Domain Review