All three heads and six arms are missing from the life-size mermaids that adorn the Heine Fountain at Grand Concourse and 164th Street. The statues are now stark, limbless torsos of crumbling white marble.
The fountain is a remnant of another time, when bilingual immigrants in the borough spoke German and English, not Spanish and English. When people worshipped at synagogues, not churches.
The fountain was installed in 1899 in honor of the 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine (pronounced HIGH-neh), who is lionized in Germany as the most famous writer of his generation other than Goethe. He was a hero particularly to the German Jews who settled in the South Bronx because he defied the government with his anti-establishment poetry. Today his fountain is in ruins and, despite his storied career, there are some who wonder what relevance it holds for the Grand Concourse of 1995.
Children use the 30-foot-tall fountain as a jungle gym or a softball backstop. Besides the missing limbs, it is covered with graffiti, and water hasn't flowed through the fountain's pumps for years.
In honor of the poet's most famous work, Die Lorelei, the mermaids surround a woman seated on a column, the Lorelei herself -- a beautiful siren on the Rhine river who lured sailors to their deaths with her singing and great beauty.
On a recent day, Robert Rodriguez, 9, and his sister Stephanie, 6, were daring each other to climb over the three mermaids without touching the ground.
Mayra Vivera, a woman babysitting Robert and Stephanie, said in Spanish that she did not know what the fountain represented. Then she threw a tennis ball against it for Robert to catch.
Julia Medina was also sitting by the fountain. She said that she and many of her neighbors didn't know whom the fountain honored.
Nevertheless the Heine Fountain represents the history of the borough, and there are many who want it to be restored. The borough president's office has raised $320,000 for the fountain so far, according to Bernd Zimmermann, the borough director of planning and development.
But half of the money is from outside the borough, he said. Way outside -- the city of Dusseldorf and the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Germany, have donated funds. And in 1991, the German federal congress gave $120,000.
The money represents a second chance for Germans to support this monument to their canonized poet -- when it was first created, in 1888, government anti-Semitism prevented its being erected in Dusseldorf, Heine's birthplace. So Empress Elisabeth of Austria passed it on to the United States as a gift.
The city has placed the fountain on its list of "Adopt-A-Monument" public art works that need private sponsors to survive. But the sponsors are hard to come by, Zimmermann said.
"The Bronx is not fashionable enough," he added. " If we were in Manhattan, no problem."