Duarte Square Monument Gets Parks Department Summer Glow-Up

The broad intersection of Canal Street and Sixth Avenue isn’t a place many people linger. It’s a place to approach the Holland Tunnel from, though genteel Soho, post-industrial Tribeca and the duplicitous counterfeit Shangri-La of Canal Street and Broadway are also near. On southeast corner, there’s Albert Capsuoto Park, a triangular sort of oasis but only sort of. Verklempt with all the commotion, an A/C/E subway station on the northeast corner will whisk one away but if you can embrace a blasted streetscape and mystery, step across the four lanes Sixth Avenue into Duarte Square. It might look like a desolate triangle but see that giant statue? It’s called the Juan Pablo Duarte Monument, and it’s there to welcome you.

This reporter has been as guilty as anyone for taking Duarte Square for granted. That it was part of the so-called Avenue of the Americas—an appellation born of Fiorello La Guardia’s good intent in 1945 but also a source of confusion where Sixth Avenue should be—made it even easier to ignore. The morning of Thursday July 29 changed everything.

Honoring Latin American Independence Leaders

There was Duarte alright, standing tall on his pedestal but there was also something else going: a man in a cherry picker with what looked like a blowtorch was applying flame to Duarte’s head! How could this be?! “Godda** scrappers will steal anything these days!” seethed the reporter but before he called 911 and ran to the 1st Precinct station house to report the crime, he realized it wasn’t a scrapper trying to take off with Duarte’s head; it was the NYC Parks Department Citywide Monument Conservation Program crew working to restore it. Also, it’s not a blowtorch he was wielding, it’s a pressure washer: Mea culpa!

Though not well-known, the monument crew is among the department’s most impressive—and impressively knowledgeable—units. They go everywhere a monument or statue is in need though, because, like nearly everything else about the Parks Department, they are desperately underfunded, it can sometimes take them a while to get there.

At Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, for example, an impressive statue of General Henry Warner Slocum—namesake of the 1904 Slocum steamship disaster that devastated the Lower East Side’s German community—has been publicly inaccessible for decades. While the statue itself, which was dedicated in 1907, appears in good shape from a distance, unless one clambers over a fence and through the wilds, who can tell for sure?

The statue of Juan Pablo Duarte, being in an open plaza devoid of vegetation save some small trees on its borders has no such issues with access.

To the contrary, Duarte so dominates his namesake he can a little intimidating. On the front of the 8-foot-tall, 5-foot-square granite pedestal he stands upon is the inscription “Founder of the Dominican Republic, 1813-1876.” The bronze statue itself, by the Italian sculptor Nicola Arrighini, stands 10 feet 6 inches tall and was donated to by the Dominican Republic to the city of New York. It was dedicated on January 26, 1978, the 165th anniversary of Duarte’s birth.

According to the Parks Department, their recent work on Duarte monument included using an aerial lift (aka a cherry picker) to thoroughly clean the statue of soiling and pollutants with pressure washer and non-ionic detergents. The status was then touched up and buffed with wax—indeed, the sight of the Parks worker rubbing Duarte’s head with a towel was oddly moving, like a trainer tending to his athlete, or a custom car enthusiast working that chamois to make a purple metal flake paint job shine more brightly.

Besides its aesthetic function of boosting Duarte’s luminosity, the wax serves as protective coating against environmental corrosion from acid rain and everything else in the air at Sixth Avenue and Canal Street.

On the same day in Soho, the monuments crew applied their magic touch to the statue of General José Artigas in Spring Street Park on Sixth Avenue. Artigas, who is considered the father of the independence of Uruguay lived from 1764-1850. His impressive 11-foot-tall statue by artist José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín was a gift from the people of Uruguay and dedicated in September 1997.

Artigas and Duarte are two of the seven monuments, all of under Parks Department care, that makes Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. The other five Latin American independence leaders honored are José Martí, José De San Martin and Simon Bolivar, all in Central Park; and Benito Juarez and José Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, both at Bryant Park.