28-05-2025
The People Who Clean the Ears of Lincoln (And Other Statues)
A collection of images of the varied workers and techniques used to maintain some of the world's largest and most prominent statues and monuments. May 28, 2025, 12:20 PM ET National Parks Service worker James Hudson uses a cloth-wrapped pole to clean the ear of the statue at the Lincoln Memorial in 1987. Maintenance workers clean a statue in Central Park, in New York City, in 2016. A municipal worker scrubs a statue of the Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 2023. A crew carries out the annual cleaning of the 120-meter-tall Ushiku Daibutsu Great Buddha statue in Ushiku, Japan, in 2022. Nelson's Column, in London's Trafalgar Square, gets a spring cleaning in 1987. Brian Lawless / PA Images / Reuters A statue of the late musician Luke Kelly in Dublin's city center is cleaned after it had been defaced overnight in 2020. The model maker Helga Mueller works to restore a model of the Statue of Liberty, seen behind a model of the U.S. Capitol Building, at Miniwelt (Miniworld) in Lichtenstein, Germany, in 2015. Tiziana Fabi / AFP / Getty The restorer Eleonora Pucci cleans Michelangelo's David using a backpack vacuum and a synthetic-fiber brush at the Galleria dell'Accademia, in Florence, Italy, in 2024. A worker cleans the statue of the spaceflight pioneer Yuri Gagarin before Cosmonauts Day in Moscow in 2023. Harry Todd / Fox Photos / Getty Workmen clean the immense statue of two horses pulling a quadriga atop Wellington Arch, at London's Hyde Park Corner, in 1939. Cleaners spray the 37-meter-tall Merlion statue on the resort island of Sentosa, in Singapore, in 2015. A worker cleans a Buddha statue in preparation for Lunar New Year celebrations at Satya Buddha Temple in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, in 2023. Alan Taylor is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
