5. Brooklyn Bridge Stampede Monument
Staten Island Sculptor Joe Reginella took the history of the Brooklyn Bridge and let his imagination run with it to create a fun piece of art that left visitors scratching their heads. In 2017 Reginella created the Brooklyn Bridge Elephant Stampede monument, fusing the real life stories of a stampede on the Brooklyn Bridge and an elephant parade into one fatal fictional tale. The nearly six feet tall bronze sculpture of three elephants trampling human victims stood in Brooklyn Bridge Park with a plaque denoting the tragic story of Jumbo, the star elephant of P.T. Barnum’s circus who, while parading across the Brooklyn Bridge, got spooked and started a stampede that left two elephants dead and many people crushed and injured. The story, which takes place on the day of the stock market crash, fuses the true event of a fatal stampede of people that occurred during the Brooklyn Bridge’s opening week due to an incorrect assumption that the bridge was collapsing, and a parade of twenty-one elephants from P.T. Barnum’s circus that were walked across the bridge to prove its stability.
This year, Reginella ripped from the headlines of another infamous time in New York City’s history – 1976, the “Summer of Sam” and the New York City blackout – to create a new sculpture displayed in The Battery and dedicated to the mysteriously missing sailors of a tugboat that was likely abducted from New York Harbor by a UFO. Reginella’s previous work, in addition to the Elephant Stampede monument, includes a monument to an octopus attack on a ferry in Staten Island harbor.
