First, in 1970, the honor rolls were stolen — bronze plaques listing the 106 fallen World War I soldiers from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Then, in 2000, a thief swiped the allegorical bronze figure at the center of the memorial.

Thus the World War I monument, one of 122 across New York City's five boroughs in the parks department's collection, stood for years in Saratoga Park as a naked slab of granite.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com