The North Hempstead Town Board awarded a $98,000 contract to Woodstock Construction Group for the construction of a plaza around the Mackay Horse Statue at Gerry Pond Park in Roslyn last week, with construction likely to start in a few months.
“We are pleased to break ground on construction this summer,” Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth said. “The new plans will help beautify the area by creating a plaza as well as adding landscaping and historical markers.”
The Mackay Horse Statue in Gerry Pond Park is one of two statues of its kind and dates back to at least the early 1900s. It was one of two statues in Clarence and Katherine Mackay’s 648-acre Gold Coast-era Harbor Hill estate.
After the property was dismantled, the one in Gerry Pond Park was in the backyard of East Hills residents Bruce and Melissa Shulman until they donated it to the Town of North Hempstead in 2010.
North Shore Monuments is in possession of the other Mackay horse statue, which had been donated to Roslyn High School but removed from campus grounds for safety reasons in 2012.
North Shore Monuments is currently working on restoring the statue at the high school, following its successful restoration of the Horse Tamer statue in Gerry Pond Park.
The Friends of the Horse Tamer group, which consists of residents advocating for the statue, had banded together to preserve the historic monuments.
Andrea Rubin, a public relations assistant at Roslyn High School, previously said the statue had become a symbol of the high school – whose restoration is now being modeled on the one in Gerry Pond Park.
“The restoration is complex and painstaking, and includes sculpting several parts of the statue that were lost to vandalism and the weather over the years,” Rubin said previously. “The beautifully restored Horse Tamer in Gerry Park provides an excellent model of how the high school’s Horse Tamer will appear when completely restored.”
In other Town Board business related to Gerry Pond Park, the town accepted a $1,100 donation from Donna Berardi and the Zibner family to buy a commemorative bench at the park for Jay Zibner.
