Sculpture of the week (December 10th, 2019)

I found documents showing the building “St Vincent’s Hospital, Leon Lowenstein Clinic” which inspired my model was built in 1930 by James W. O’connor, an architect who had quite a portfolio of work on Long Island estates and other buildings. There’s documents and photos in the Historic American Building Survey on the Library of Congress site from 1980. The clinic is in the photo below, demolished in 1980. I was able to purchase the orginal stone carving circled in the photo, but unfortunately after it was taken down and laid on an industrial warehouse  platform cart I brought to transport it- it was so large and heavy I could not even roll the cart! The stone was about 8″ thick, 4 feet by 7 or so feet long, it weighed somewhere around 2,000 pounds, I had to have the demolition crew jackhammer just the part with the sitting figure out of it for me.

St Vincent’s hospital itself was demolished later.

Working from photos of it I replicated the entire design in a much smaller scale.