Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Arch Reopens After $8.9M Restoration
After nearly two years of extensive restoration, the soaring Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, New York, has reopened to the public. The completion of the nearly $8.9 million project was celebrated last week in a ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by the New York City Department of Parks and the Prospect Park Alliance (PPA), which oversaw the refurbishment of the 80-foot-tall Beaux-Arts landmark.
Built between 1889 and 1892, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch was designed by John H. Duncan as a commemoration of Union Army forces that fell in the Civil War. It is one of three Civil War triumphal arches in the city, which include the Washington Square Arch and the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge.
Located north of Prospect Park, the post-Civil War monument sits in the center of one of Brooklyn’s busiest traffic circles, where it currently serves as a gathering site for countless community events, public protests, and the year-round weekly farmer’s market. But since its last major restoration in the mid-1990s, the archway had fallen into serious disrepair, overtaken by invasive plants and crumbling infrastructure.
The recent makeover, funded by former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, consisted mainly of repairs that replaced the roof and inner steel beams, fixed broken stonework, and reconstructed its interior spiral staircases. It also added a new internal drainage system and redesigned the monument’s evening lighting to highlight its bronze statuary groupings designed by Brooklyn-born sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. These works, which are located on its roof and north-facing pedestals, depict the goddess Columbia, a female personification of the United States, and Union Army soldiers and sailors; the grouping on the right side of the arch includes the city’s only public statue of a Black Civil War sailor.
“This is where people say, ‘Okay, meet you under the arch… It’s kind of the heart and thoroughfare of the borough,” Morgan Monaco, president of the PPA, told Hyperallergic at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Previously delayed due to pandemic slowdown, the restoration was expected to wrap in the fall of 2023. However, as PPA’s Director of Architecture and Preservation David Yum told Hyperallergic, the restoration team that worked on revamping the arch encountered dozens of unforeseen challenges, one of the most difficult being addressing decades of moisture and water damage to the five-layer roof.
“ After decades of water, it was almost impossible to get all the moisture out, so that took us months and months [to figure out,]” Yum said. “It’s one thing when it’s one or two materials, but when it’s five materials, it’s really challenging.”
The entire project required extensive research into the monument’s materials and structural framework. Because the original blueprints for the memorial arch were lost to time, the PPA’s in-house team of architects had to rely on physical surveys from previous restorations and detailed scans of the arch’s interior developed with radar and magnetic technology. They used laboratory testing to trace the existing stonework mortar back to a quarry in Rosendale, New York, and replaced fractured stonework with matching stone from a Maine quarry. Additionally, the bronze and cast-iron spiral staircases and entrance gates were cleaned scrupulously in a process that required them to be completely disassembled and reassembled.
At last week’s ceremony, attendees got an up-close peek at the monument’s restoration, including a tour up the arch’s staircases and overhead Trophy Room. While no longer open to the public, these interior spaces were previously used as a public arts exhibition space in the 1980s and a storage for a Puppet Library collection in the early 2000s (which is currently located in Roosevelt Hall at Brooklyn College).
Alongside the work on the arch, the restoration of Grand Army Plaza has also involved repairs to the Bailey Fountain and landscaping improvements to the surrounding berms. The completion of the archway shortly follows the opening of the bronze sculpture installation Monuments to Motherhood (2024) by New York City-based artist Molly Gochman, which went on display directly across from the triumphal structure in late April.
