The official name of this sculpture seems to be kept a secret. Fans call it "The Iron Man". The 2009 work is by artist Jon Krawczyk. It is 22-foot tall and is made of stainless steel. The piece is set on a sandy surface for some reason and depicts a fully uniformed hockey player with his stick on the ice while his right leg is raised high behind him.
A video of the sculpture being installed can be seen at (
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The Newark Star-Ledger reported this story on August 17, 2009 (
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"NEWARK -- Jon Krawczyk braved the heat today to witness his creation -- a nearly three-story stainless steel hockey player -- rise outside The Rock, the home of the New Jersey Devils.
"When you mess with the Devil, I guess you have to get in the kitchen," the sculptor said as temperatures reached well into the 90s in Newark. "It was cooking."
The sculpture, weighing 6,000 pounds, was put upright during often tense moments with the aid of ropes on the plaza outside the Prudential Center arena at Edison Place and Mulberry Street.
"It's like skating on the patio," he said shortly before 6 p.m., more than 9 hours after he delivered the towering man of steel.
The journey is one Krawczyk won't soon forget.
Last year, Krawczyk personally took the wheel of a truck to lead the expressionistic sculpture on a four-day cross-country trek from his Malibu, Calif., studio to his boyhood home in Boonton Township.
There, it waited a year under his mother's watchful eyes for today's perspiration-filled assembly, more than a month ahead of an "official" Sept. 29 unveiling at a Devils pre-season game.
The tall hockey player that some call "The Iron Man" is just the latest creation by the 39-year-old Krawczyk, whose handiwork has showed up at Texas A&M's art building and the Four Seasons Hotel in Hollywood, Fla.
To pull this one off, the longtime Devils fan actually got in touch with Michael Gilfillan, one of the owners of the Devils and a former classmate at Delbarton in Morristown, and successfully pitched the idea.
"I wanted to meld those things together -- to do a sports sculpture that could be appreciated as art," he said last year.
It took eight months to complete.
The road-trip was uneventful -- that is until Sunday night. It turns out someone stole the truck trailer's lights and brake lines during its layover, he said.
"I didn't realize that until last night," he said today. 'I figure it must have been a Ranger fan.'"