Philadelphia owns more than 1,000 public artworks. Scores are missing.

At least six historical markers designed by Paul Philippe Cret, the famed architect of Rittenhouse Square and other Philadelphia marvels, have vanished from Old City and Society Hill.

In South Philadelphia, thieves made off with a bronze and steel bear sculpted by the late Pennsylvania of Fine Arts instructor Karl Karhumaa.

“Only stump remains,” an official noted.

These rank among 85 public artworks flagged as missing in Philadelphia, according to city inventory records obtained by The Inquirer through a Right-to-Know request.

Among the lost are memorial plaques pried from sidewalks, metal sculptures ripped from neighborhood parks, and oil paintings disappeared from municipal buildings.

With 8% of its pieces labeled missing, the city’s claim to owning “over 1,000″ public artworks may well be, like the iconic Rocky statue, a fictional figure. No one can say for certain because City Hall has not surveyed the entire 1,050-item portfolio in decades.

Public art experts recommend cities conduct a full inventory once every few years to determine conservation needs. The last major survey in Philadelphia took place when Ed Rendell was mayor — back in 1997.

The lapse in stewardship reflects a chronic funding challenge for public arts programs nationwide. In Philadelphia, two of the city’s last four mayors gutted the public arts office during budget shortfalls. Stewardship experts said such disinvestment comes with hidden costs: the loss of valuable assets, but also history.

“It’s essential to have systems for ongoing monitoring and record-keeping,” said David Knowles, founder of the UK-based art consultancy Artelier, noting that government turnover “makes it easy for records to be lost over time.”

Art officials in Seattle and San Antonio, in comparison, said they conduct an inventory every two years. Las Vegas does one every year. Phoenix reports no missing artworks. Austin records 28. Here: 85.

But the actual number could be much higher.

The city does update its registry with new additions, like the 2017 statue of civil rights activist Octavius Catto on City Hall’s south apron. The public arts office has published a guide showcasing 167 well-known items, beginning with Alexander Milne Calder’s 1892 William Penn statue atop City Hall.

But the bulk of the vast portfolio is composed of lesser-known works — and some listed as present in the collection have been defaced or have gone missing.

The city painted over or removed three artworks commissioned from a local artist Rebecca Rose in the 1980s, and yet all are counted as current assets.

City Hall itself is home to over more than 220 artworks, from judicial portraits to historic plaques. A reporter’s survey of the building found dozens of paintings no longer where they were listed. The number of mayoral portraits the city records say adorn the mayor’s reception room doesn’t match the number of canvases on the walls.

A portrait of a 19th-century Philadelphia judge was last recorded to hang in “Courtroom 423” — but that room no longer exists.

The Office of Arts and Culture, as it was long known, was abolished in 2004 under then-Mayor John F. Street, restored in 2008 under a new name by Mayor Michael Nutter, and then dismantled again in 2020 by Mayor Jim Kenney, a pandemic-era austerity measure that drew national attention.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has once again revived and rebranded the public arts office as “Creative Philadelphia.” The administration budgeted about $1 million annually for 10 staffers to manage the city collection, commission new pieces, conserve the old, and put on arts programs.

Valerie Gay, tapped by Parker last spring to lead the office, said an inventory is long overdue.

“Have I laid eyes personally on all 1,000 pieces? No,” Gay said. “But that has been on our list.”

Gay said she has already sought funds to build an online database, bringing Philadelphia more in line with its peers.

“It is important for us to know what we have, and to care for what we have,” Gay said.

Philadelphia’s municipal art collection dates back to at least 1744. But it changed dramatically in 1959, when the city adopted the nation’s first “percent for art” program.

The model — which mandates a percentage of major development projects’ budgets go toward public art — proved so popular that dozens of cities copied it. Philadelphia’s collection more than doubled since then, with at least 650 works commissioned through private developers and more than 300 by the city.

With new commissions, ongoing gifts from benefactors, and other acquisitions, the city soon had more art than it could track.

Some “missing” works appear to have been intentionally junked.

In the 1960s, park employees at Independence Mall suggested destroying 11 now-missing panels commemorating the Declaration of Independence, calling them unusable for anything but “scrap metal.”

It’s difficult to tell from the records when some works were last seen.

Some items may never have actually existed. A tablet in the Betsy Ross House, added to the registry in 1957 and attributed to “Baker the Sign Man”, drew skepticism from art officials at one point.

“Employees of the Betsy Ross House have never seen or heard of such a tablet,” one official noted, in an undated entry. “Also, who is ‘Baker the Sign Man’ supposed to be???”

In the 1990s, fiscal watchdogs called for less spending on new art and better care of maintenance for the existing collection.

Two former City Hall officials recalled cataloging outdoor sculptures in the 1990s, amid a nationwide movement to survey public art. However, they said the 1997 inventory referenced in public records was not a comprehensive survey.

Public art stewards had advocated for it over the years, said Carol Lawrence, who led the arts office from 2000 to 2004. But lawmakers had other priorities.

“Those pieces tell the story of the city,” she said. “Was there the ability to go out and do a site listing for [all the] pieces? No.”

Without consistent oversight, City Hall has long relied on the public to keep an eye on its vast collection.

In 1991, thieves hauled away a 19th-century sculpture from a granite pedestal in Fairmount Park. It was recovered days later inside a Fishtown warehouse, thanks to a watchful resident.

More recently, in November, another Cret plaque disappeared from Rittenhouse Square. Friends of the park took immediate notice.

In some neighborhoods, works vanish or crumble without much alarm.

Public art has been a source of pride throughout Rebecca Rose’s career. One of her proudest commissions was titled “Civilization,” a 1986 installation at Cruz Recreation Center in North Philadelphia.

Affixed to the rec center’s brick wall, the angular aluminum relief contains allusions to the Mayan temples, a nod to the artist’s family roots in Belize. Rose recalled getting support from community leaders before installing the piece.

“They wanted to see their community growing, so ‘Civilization’ was about that growth,” she said.

At some point, the city listed the sculpture as missing. In fact, an Inquirer reporter found someone had painted over it during a recent remodeling, the relief now faintly visible along a gray wall. Two other outdoor works Rose created for the city have also since been removed.

City officials said they try to alert artists when a piece is defaced, stolen, or moved. Rose said she never received any notice.

“I look at it like this: it served its time, it did what it was supposed to do,” she said. “Our lives move on, and I can move on.”

While the city tries to conserve more work in low-income neighborhoods, new commissions and notable works still tend to get the most attention.

“There’s always that question, ‘do you love all your children the same?’ Do you love the rec center bas-relief the same as you love the Joan of Arc?” said Charlotte Cohen, executive director at Association for Public Art, a nonprofit stewardship group. “It’s very tough. Those are real challenges.”

Hundreds of publicly visible works — take the popular Clothespin next to City Hall — fall under private ownership. Mural Arts, the nonprofit turned government agency, manages the city’s renowned collection of 4,000 murals.

As for the city-owned pieces, stewardship is shared from the courts system to the parks department.

Perhaps as a result, works that appear missing may simply change homes or move into storage, and the change of location never gets recorded.

When the Philadelphia Police Department left the Roundhouse in 2022, so did the 1977 sculpture of a police officer holding a pigtailed girl on his hip that long sat outside the Race Street headquarters. But the bronze casting didn’t end up at the new HQ on Broad Street.

Instead, the police union took it and reinstalled it outside their offices in Northeast Philadelphia. City records don’t reflect that move.

In 2018, protesters toppled a statue of Viking explorer Thorfinn Karlsefni into the Schuylkill, likely because the statue had become a popular meeting spot for white supremacists. Two years later, amid civil unrest following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Mayor Kenney preemptively moved the controversial Frank Rizzo statue into storage. (Neither relocation was documented in the art database.)

Other cities have proven it can be done.

Seattle is home to over 4,000 public artworks. With a 10-person public art staff, comparable to Philadelphia, collections manager Blake Haygood said his team maintains a public database. One staffer works year-round to “log every move.”

In Philadelphia, stewardship woes are not unique to City Hall.

A decade ago, the Philadelphia School District reported losing at least 73 works from its 1,000-item collection. Alan Butkovitz, the former city controller who probed the missing art at the time, says he is not surprised that the city hasn’t kept track of its pieces.

Politicians, he said, view public art with indifference.

“The view is it doesn’t really belong to anybody,” he said. “We don’t need it to remove the snow or catch criminals or put out fires.”