The Vladimir Lenin Statue in New York's Lower East Side
An 18-foot tall bronze statue of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin hovers over the edge of an unassuming brick apartment building in New York’s Lower East Side. This sculpture was originally created in 1982 sometime in the final months of Leonid Brezhnev’s term as head of the USSR and just a few years before Gorbachev’s implementation of perestroika (political & economic reform). Upon the dissolution of the USSR in 1989, the statue fell out of favor with Russia’s changed political climate. Concurrently, the American property developers Michael Rosen and Michael Shaoul were in Moscow and happened upon the statue discarded in a backyard on the outskirts of the capital. Coincidentally, the pair had established an apartment building in New York’s East Village that same year, the aptly titled Red Square. This sculptural find proved to be the ideal marker of the newly opened apartment building. And so, the sculpture was brought back to the United States and was eventually installed on the Red Square rooftop in 1994 as a symbol of the longstanding political spirit of the neighborhood. However, a real estate conglomerate purchased Red Square in 2016, to which Rosen and Shaoul removed the Lenin statue out of concern that the new owners would discard it. The story was the subject of much media attention that came to a close in Fall 2016 when the Lenin statue was finally installed on the roof of 178 Norfolk Street where it stands today.
178 Norfolk Street is located between East Houston and Stanton Streets and the statue can easily be seen from street-level.