The Skate Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln’s Unexpected Legacy in Prospect Park

Abraham Lincoln never thought he would witness a kickflip. Never mind seeing one while cast in bronze and elevated nearly nineteen feet high over the southeast corner of Prospect Park lake. However if you stroll through the park’s ornate Concert Grove and make your way down to the waterfront esplanade, taking care to avoid the skateboarders flying around Abe’s feet, you will find yourself being scrutinized by more than the sunbathing red-eared slider turtles who have (against all odds) also made the lake their home. Skaters grind, slide, and slam under the watchful eye of the United States’s 16th President, a reappropriation of historical and public space that seems either irritating, destructive, improbable, or welcome depending on your perspective. 

The statue, the first to be erected in a Union state when it was dedicated in Grand Army Plaza on October 21, 1869, was made by Henry Kirke Browne. Although schooled in classical Italian technique, Browne’s Lincoln was born of the artist’s attempt to forge a new, distinctly American artistic culture. Lincoln was no demi-god but a real man. While in a classical stance, his gaunt features are also captured, and he wears his signature flowing robes as he points at a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

When you enter Prospect Park now, various signs remind you that it is “yours.” Fittingly, the Lincoln statue could be deemed the people’s statue in the people’s park. Its construction was financed by the local citizens of the War Fund Committee of Brooklyn, both Democrat and Republican, and 15,000 people turned out to watch its unveiling. In his opening address A.A. Low, a mercantile businessman and original incorporator of the Long Island Historical Society (later to become the Center for Brooklyn History), declared that “an appeal … was addressed to the people, the people responded gladly.” 

The memorial was intended as a permanent reminder of Lincoln’s toil, civic virtue, and stoic sacrifice. Local minister Dr. R.S. Storrs Jr.’s speech stated that “he is one of the men of whom other lands and future ages are sure to speak,” and that the statue should be “as permanent in (its) structure as nature permits.” In this sense, the statue was deliberately forward looking. It was designed as an instructively indestructible reminder for future generations who might forget Lincoln’s role in saving the “remarkable American people” from themselves. 

Ironically, the statue soon became overshadowed and ever more insignificant. In a marker of the shift from commemorating great leaders to the previously unheralded rank and file, it was soon crowded out from its original spot in Grand Army Plaza by the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, an 80 foot monument dedicated in 1892 to “the Defenders of the Union, 1861-1865.” Moved to its current location in Concert Grove, by the 1980s it was covered in graffiti, looted by vandals, and corroded by nature and the passing of time. 

The fall from grace of Lincoln’s statue is a reminder that, of all the tools history can give us, humility might be one of the most useful. When Reverend Storrs Jr., with typical Brooklynite certainty, proclaimed the statue “honorable, we doubt not, for the influence that shall flow from it into the future” as an inspiration for generations to come, he could not have imagined its future as an itinerant bronze interloper. While Lincoln himself has been long-welcomed into the canon of great (albeit flawed) American presidents, it would be a stretch to say Henry Kirke Browne’s statue played any meaningful role in this process. When measured against the lofty goals of its dedication, one wouldn't be blamed for concluding that it had, through no fault of its own, failed. 

Yet of course, when dealing with a leader synonymous with the ‘great American experiment,’ it would be decidedly un-American to end on such a bitter note. The statue was renovated during the 1980s thanks to the Municipal Art Society's Adopt-A-Monument Program, restoring Lincoln and the decorative shields and eagles that surrounded him to their original glory. Today, you can find skaters jostling for position with tourists taking photos of Abe, park-goers with speakers blasting rap and reggae into the old President’s ears, and children careening around the base of his statue. Skaters, in their own way, have taken up the mantle of caring for the monument, using bondo (a fake cement filler) to shore up any cracks in its base that might pitch them off their board. 

In this sense, the statue hasn’t failed at all, its purpose has simply changed. It is a space that has adapted and been repurposed for the needs of its community. It serves as a metaphor for the repeated destructions, rejuvenations, and makeovers of Prospect Park itself. After all, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux always intended areas of the park to be set aside for leisure. Brooklynites have just updated what leisure means and how the park can provide it. Lincoln’s circuitous journey to the lower area of Concert Grove, a cast off cast in bronze, echoes the familiar meta-narrative of the neglected finding a new home and purpose in New York. Lincoln witnessing a kickflip begins to appear less improbable once this winding, shared history is taken into account. Who knows what he will watch over in the years to come. 

Sources:

1. "Abraham Lincoln, Unveiling of the Lincoln Statue in Brooklyn," New York Times, October 22, 1869, https://www.nytimes.com/1869/10/22/archives/abraham-lincoln-unvailing-of-the-lincoln-statue-in-brooklyn-great.html.
2. "Prospect Park, Abraham Lincoln," NYC Parks, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/B073/monuments/911.