The bronze statuette of Mercury now standing atop Helicline Fine Art proprietor Keith Sherman's kitchen island once stood atop a traffic light on Fifth Avenue. Over 100 of these statuettes formerly lined the famous thoroughfare from Eighth Street to 59th Street, but the figures vanished from the streetscape over 60 years ago. What happened to these gilded gods and how did Sherman get a hold of not one, but four of them?
To trace the appearance and disappearance of Fifth Avenue's Mercury statuettes, we need to look at the earliest days of vehicular traffic on Fifth Avenue. They were a mess. To help ease the flow of traffic, five elevated signaling sheds were constructed in 1920. A patrolman at each post manually operated the tri-colored signal lights. These signals were effective in cutting down travel time along the avenue.
The first signaling sheds were built simply for function and painted with black and white stripes for visibility. A couple of years after their installment, the Fifth Avenue Association offered to pay for more ornamental and permanent versions. A design competition was held and the victor was American sculptor Joseph H. Freedlander.
Freedlander designed a series of ornate bronze towers that stood 23 feet tall on a granite base. The towers were adorned with neoclassical ornamentation such as eagles, torches, and foliage. An illuminated clock sat at the center of the tower below the glass-enclosed space where the patrolman operated the signal, a space heated by an electric stove according to the New York Times.
As traffic signal technology advanced, the bulky manually operated towers became obsolete. Freedlander was tasked with designing traffic light poles to take their place along Fifth Avenue. He topped these slender bronze poles with a figure of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce and travel.
Freedlander's depiction of Mercury stands atop a globe wearing a World War I-style helmet and a sash draped around his waist and arms. One arm is outstretched while the other holds a winged wheel at his side. The figure stood atop a rectangular traffic light with just two colors.
Two Mercury statues were installed at 41st Street and Fifth Avenue in 1931 and more were added until they stretched all the way from 8th to 59th Street.
The Mercury statuettes stood watch over Fifth Avenue for over thirty years until more innovations in street lighting and signaling were made. Many of the ornate lampposts of the early twentieth century began to be replaced by sleek modern posts in the 1950s. By 1962, the changes hit Fifth Avenue.
Christopher Gray wrote in theNew York Times in 1997 that Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes had the Mercurcy statues removed in 1964 "to stop souvenir hunters." The paper reported that the removal process was complete by Christmas of that year.
Another article in theNew York Times from 1971 states that the statuettes were briefly reinstalled due to public demand after Michael B. Grosse, executive vice president of the Fifth Avenue Association at the time, had the statuettes refurbished. It's unclear when the statues were taken down again, but they were gone by the time Gray wrote about them in the 1990s.
Throughout the coverage in the Times the disappearance of the statues was attributed to traffic accidents, vandalism, theft, and destruction. Gray wrote that the statuettes were "junked for scrap." He was able to track down just three of the 104 statues that once existed. He found two in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York and one in the office of the Fifth Avenue Association. Untapped New York reached out to those institutions to check on the tiny Mercury figures.
MCNY confirmed that the museum has one in its collection, while the representative we corresponded with for the Fifth Avenue Association said they were unable to turn up any photos or information about a statuette in their possession.
A former chairman of the Fifth Avenue Association wrote a letter to the editor in 1997 in response to Gray's piece, stating that he remembered the Association giving out the statues to "guest of honor at the annual luncheon, which took place at the Waldorf-Astoria for a great many years." Clearly not all the statues had been destroyed. They are out there somewhere.
Art collector Keith Sherman, co-owner of Helicline Fine Art, has been lucky enough to find multiple Mercury statues on the antique market. "I pour through hundreds of auctions every week and at one point I was just fascinated by this gorgeous Art Deco Mercury," Sherman told Untapped New York. He didn't know the backstory at first but after doing research on the artist and learning about the statuette's New York City history, he was hooked.
His first Mercury find was in the 1990s. In total, Sherman has found four of the statuettes. He has sold two, one is at his Manhattan home and another is at an upstate property. You can see the Manhattan Mercury up close when Untapped New York Members get to spend an evening at Helicine Fine Art Gallery this January!
An Evening with the Proprietors of Helicline Fine Art
January 7th at 7 PM ET: Free and open to members at the Insider tier and higher. Registration opens on December 23rd.
Sherman's Mercury statues have come from the families of former Department of Transportation workers who he surmises salvaged the statues when they were removed from their posts. His most recent Mercury find was during the pandemic and he always has an eye out for more. "Every time I look at an auction, in my head, I'm saying 'When I flip to the next page, will there be a Mercury? Will there be another one?'"
If you remember seeing the Mercury statues on Fifth Ave or have ever come across one since they were removed, let us know by leaving a comment!
