At #178 Norfolk Street south of East Houston, keep looking up for a triumphant statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the chief architect of the Soviet state that ruled much of eastern Europe from 1918-1990, atop an apartment building on the north side of East Houston Street between Avenues A and B. There is also a large clock looming over the building, unusual in its own way; I’ll talk about that in a separate FNY post.
The statue of Lenin, and the “crazy clock” that has all the numbers on the dial in out of place positions, are and were part of a luxury apartment building known as Red Square since 1989, when it was developed by owner Michael Rosen, a former professor of radical sociology at NYU who, after finishing work on Red Square, concentrated on developing housing for battered women and AIDS sufferers.
On a previous Forgotten NY page, Michael Rosen discussed the statue:
The statue of Lenin was found by a partnership of 3 guys named Walker, Ursitti and McGinnis (WUM). They had an art business in NYC and the USSR. They asked me to invest with them in a painting they said was worth quite a bit, and as a part of the deal they located a monumental Lenin statue because I wanted one for the roof of Red Square, and also a much smaller bronze statue of a grandfatherly Lenin sitting on a park bench.
In 2016 the building on Houston upon which the statue was originally hoisted was sold, and thus Rosen had it moved to 178 Norfolk, which he also owned. This statue was quite a surprise when aAi showed it to tourgoers on FNY’s Lower East Side tour in the fall of 2014. Photos from FNY’s first 100 tours, suspended since COVID (but I occasionally do zoom tours and live slide shows) can be found on this page.
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2/6/25