Honest Abe Headed Home?

Honest Abe is finally homeward bound.

After 114 years in Prospect Park, the park plans to move a statue of Abraham Lincoln back to its original location in Grand Army Plaza.

, the Parks Department allocated $64,000 to a study that would investigate moving the Prospect Park Abraham Lincoln statue from its current home in the Concert Grove. Earlier this month, the Borough Board – a body made up of the Borough President, the City Council members from the borough, and the chair of each of the borough's community boards – unanimously approved the plans.

The Lincoln statue was dedicated in 1869, just four years after his assassination. Originally mounted in Grand Army Plaza, near where the statue of JFK now stands in the plaza’s center, old Abe was transferred to the lower terrace of Prospect Park's Concert Grove in 1896, after being dwarfed by the installation of the comparatively massive Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch four years earlier.

Now, as part of its $70 million Wollman rink renovation, the Prospect Park Alliance hopes it can send the statue back from where it came. When the Wollman ice-skating rink was built nearby in 1960, its surrounding chain-link fence once again dethroned the Lincoln statue.

But Lincoln’s move home would also dethrone another local hero – a bust of Alexander J.C. Skene, a Brooklyn doctor who was the Professor of Disease of Women at Long Island College Hospital. Skeene is known for his contributions to surgical technique and his descriptions of what is now known as the Skene's glands.

"We think it's more important that Lincoln be on this axis than Skeene," said Crystal Gaudio, a landscape architect for the Propsect Park Alliance who presented the idea to Community Board 6 on Thursday.

Lincoln would replace Skene at the top of Grand Army Plaza – making him a central focal point of the plaza – and Skeene would instead be moved about 180 feet to the east.

The move itself would be paid for by the city, but additional funding would need to be raised to landscape the area. Next month, the park will take its proposal to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“We whole heartedly endorse this idea,” said Robert Minsky, a member of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. “We’ve been trying to encourage more use of Grand Army Plaza, and we think this will do that.”