Brooklyn reclaims two sculptures Robert Moses tried to erase

Near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, two women made of translucent acrylic slowly rotate on a steel pedestal. They're not new, exactly. They're a reimagining of sculptures that stood here over a century ago—before a master builder decided they were in the way.

Daniel Chester French carved Miss Manhattan and Miss Brooklyn in 1904 as ornamental pylons for the bridge's Beaux-Arts entrance. Miss Manhattan sits with confident posture, one foot planted on a chest. Miss Brooklyn is more reserved, gazing downward. The contrast was deliberate: two allegorical figures representing the boroughs' supposedly fixed relationship, with Manhattan as the clear center of gravity.

Then came Robert Moses. In the early 1960s, as traffic choked the Manhattan Bridge, Moses proposed razing the pylons to make room for expressways and highways. The Lower Manhattan Expressway never materialized, but the pylons did. French's sculptures were boxed up and sent to the Brooklyn Museum, where they sat for decades in a kind of exile.

The sculptures' return came not through nostalgia but through necessity. As Downtown Brooklyn underwent economic renewal in the early 2000s, the city decided to reconstruct Flatbush Avenue Extension and make it more walkable. Artist Brian Tolle won the commission through a percent-for-art program. His proposal, titled "Pageant," wasn't about restoration. It was about conversation.

Tolle three-dimensionally scanned the original sculptures and recreated them in translucent acrylic—a material that catches light differently than stone, that feels contemporary without erasing history. He mounted them on a steel pedestal inspired by the Manhattan Bridge's own structure. And he gave them the ability to move: the two figures rotate individually and together, as if in dialogue.

The symbolism works on multiple levels. There's the obvious one: Brooklyn gets its sculptures back, a quiet correction of Moses-era erasure. But the rotation does something subtler. As the figures spin, they face all directions at once—not fixed in hierarchy, but orbiting each other. In the 21st century, Manhattan no longer has an exclusive claim on production and wealth. Brooklyn has become a center of its own. The sculptures, now mobile and luminous, embody that shift.

When you walk past Pageant on a clear night, the acrylic catches the light from the bridge above. The two figures turn slowly, catching your eye from different angles depending on when you pass. It's easy to miss what's happening—easy to see it as just a public art installation. But it's also a small, persistent argument about who gets to shape a city's narrative, and whether the past can be reclaimed without being frozen in place.