By Liz Tung
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY — In 1886, France bestowed a gift on New York that was to become one of the city’s most iconic landmarks — the Statue of Liberty. More than a century later, New York’s landscape is still benefiting from its generous friends from across the pond, albeit on a smaller scale. For the next week, a group of French volunteers will be working to beautify, rehabilitate and restore monuments in Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery.

The group, of course, is not merely a bunch of philanthropic tourists on a lark. Rather, they came through Preservation Volunteers Inc., a French-American non-profit that matches up volunteers with historic preservation projects.

Thursday at 11:30 a.m., the troupe launched one of their more significant projects, the David Stewart Mausoleum. The monument, which was built circa 1883, is significant not only for its age and interred tenant (Stewart was a 19th century steel and coal magnate whose daughter founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston), but for its unique artistic merit.

The mausoleum was designed by Stanford White, a legendary 19th century architect who is perhaps best known for the Washington Square arch, and being murdered at the hands of cuckolded millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw. The monument is also adorned with a series of bronzes sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, another giant in America’s 19th century art world. The bronze reliefs portray robed angels with benign expressions.

Volunteers will assist in the restoration of the bronze reliefs by cleaning and waxing them. Though none of them are experts, according to the Preservation Volunteers (PV) Web site, participants receive some instruction in preserving and restoring stonework through PV’s partnership with REMPART (Union for the Restoration and Preservation of Monuments and Artistic Heritage), a major French preservationist organization that enacts restoration through volunteer work.

REMPART was the inspiration for PV, which was founded in 1999 by Brooklynites Evelyn and Everett Ortner, who were inspired after seeing the “amazing transformation� of historical sites in Normandy that were restored by REMPART volunteers. The Ortners modeled PV after REMPART, recruiting young volunteers to restore historical sites, landmarks and monuments that, as a statement PV released notes, “might otherwise be abandoned to decay — perhaps for lack of money, or of needed skills, or of available labor.�

PV’s first project, in 2002, was a joint effort of French and American volunteers to restore objects and sites in the Green-Wood Cemetery and in Brooklyn's historic Fort Greene Park. In the years since, French volunteers have continued their restoration work at sites around Brooklyn (including yearly visits to the Green-Wood Cemetery), upstate New York and Colorado. American volunteers have also traveled to France to work on similar projects.

A number of the volunteers this summer are staying on the cemetery grounds. They will continue their work for another week-and-a-half (including two days for sightseeing) before returning home.

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