I was reading a newspaper one day when an old photograph caught my eye. It showed a hot summer day in Chicago. Barefoot children were playing in a splash pool and climbing a giant stylized sculpture of a bull. The photo was taken in front of the Jane Addams Homes in Little Italy, not far from where I live. The bull was one of seven art deco sculptures in Chicago designer Edgar Miller’s Animal Court, which had stood outside the public housing complex until most of those buildings were demolished in the early 2000s.

I hadn’t lived in the neighborhood long enough to share it with Miller’s limestone animals. But I soon learned that the sculptures hadn’t been lost: They were being restored by a man named Andrzej Dajnowski, who was working on refurbishing them ahead of their installation at the new National Public Housing Museum.

Last year, I visited Dajnowski at his studio in suburban Forest Park, where I came face to face with Miller’s creations. A buffalo, a bear, and a ram stood next to a wall near a window, surrounded by buckets of tools and cleaning solutions. The nose of the giant bull, the largest of the group, peeked out from plastic wrap.

Dajnowski has been taking care of local public art for nearly 35 years, first as an employee of and now as a contractor for the Chicago Park District and the Art Institute of Chicago. He’s the city’s top conservator of monuments, sculptures, and fountains — the guy you trust to preserve and clean Chicago’s finest public works. Not least the Art Institute’s iconic lions. “You can imagine what a decision that was for the institution,” says Rachel Sabino, the museum’s director of objects and textiles conservation. “There really is no one we trust more for this type of work locally than Andrzej.”

Tapped by municipalities, institutions, and private collectors, Dajnowski cleans, shines, repairs, regilds, and even recreates pieces, often taking them apart and putting them back together. “Everything he touches, he’s thinking generations ahead: How is his fingerprint going to help that piece survive in the long term for prosperity?” says Michael Fus, a preservation architect with the Chicago Park District who oversees the agency’s 200 monuments and sculptures and has worked with Dajnowski for more than 28 years.

Dajnowski’s studio — a gray low-rise with just a few small windows — resembles a large garage, and in it are all sorts of treasures: dozens of century-old lamps from the U.S. Supreme Court, a chandelier from the Art Institute, samples of decorative ceiling from the former Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street, and a private collector’s sculpture of a skinny black rabbit that Dajnowski says is worth more than his studio. Soft-spoken with a calm demeanor, Dajnowski has blue eyes and a sharp gaze. Though he travels often for business, he prefers to labor here in the quiet. He points out the different materials he works with: bronze, wood, stones of various kinds.

Dajnowski came to Chicago in 1985 from Gdańsk, Poland, which in those days was engulfed in political turmoil, including protests against the authoritarian Communist government. As a student at a fine arts college, he steered clear of the Solidarity movement, which swept the campus. He recalls witnessing city crews clear away sand soaked with blood from street clashes. A friend was injured by a flare gun. Another lost his leg after it got caught between a train and a platform as he fled from ZOMO, a paramilitary squad known for its brutality. For Dajnowski, newly a father, Poland was a harrowing place. “I could not imagine my son growing up in this climate. It was a little too much to take.”

Then he did “something stupid,” as he puts it: He called a policeman “a Gestapo.” He was arrested and threatened with a five-year prison sentence. But by a stroke of luck, a few months later, Dajnowski obtained a visa to go to America, where his mother lived. Plans for a doctorate in art conservation had to be put off. He still wonders why the Communist government let him go: “Maybe they just wanted to get rid of me.”

He arrived in Chicago with his wife, their 2-year-old son, and a master’s in sculpture — but without the ability to speak English. He took a cleaning job with other Polish immigrants. The money was decent, but he wanted something more, so he began working as a woodcarver in a frame shop, where he practiced English with a Native American coworker.

A year and a half after his arrival, Dajnowski was accepted to Harvard’s postgraduate conservation program. There he had access to some of the field’s top experts — and the opportunity to intern at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., which led to a contract as a coordinator of the museum’s exhibit on the information age. He maintained hundreds of artifacts, including the original Morse key, the first telephones, and a Polish bomba — a machine used to break Germany’s Enigma cipher.

Soon enough, he moved to Chicago for a job with the park district, taking care of its monuments. Fus remembers the first time they worked together, on a major restoration of the 18-foot-tall bronze Goethe sculpture in Lincoln Park in 1998. It involved cleaning, removing the patina, and restoring the finish to a dark brown. “He is very much a perfectionist,” says Fus. “Every detail is thought out.”

After about a decade at the agency, Dajnowski opened his own company, keeping as clients his old employers — the park district and the Art Institute, which had covered half his salary — while extending his expertise to others around the country. He increasingly turned to laser cleaning, a specialized technique that was uncommon at the time. In 2005, he employed that method on Chicago’s Driehaus Museum, then called the Nickerson House, making it the first building in North America to be cleaned by laser. These days, most of his cleaning projects involve lasers made by his son, Bartosz.

It’s not technology, though, that makes Dajnowski so good at what he does — it’s patience. He meticulously researches each project, often for years, like the near decade he spent experimenting before restoring Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time, a majestic sculpture in Washington Park. His work on it began in 1999. The main problem he had to solve: It was a 126-foot-long piece of concrete without any expansion joints — in other words, nothing to accommodate the material’s inevitable expansion and contraction, which stressed the structure. (“Have you ever seen a sidewalk without cracks?” Dajnowski asks.) Over the years, the monument had been exposed to the elements, and the concrete had eroded to the point where it revealed structural damage underneath. Dajnowski studied the cracks and surface issues, analyzed temperature and humidity, and researched the concrete’s characteristics. Corroded iron rebar was treated with titanium, and Dajnowski and his crew filled the cracks and resurfaced the sculpture with a special aggregate concrete he created.

Another time, he had to remove graffiti from Indigenous artwork in Texas dating back thousands of years — without touching it. The Native American leaders involved had stressed that he couldn’t risk damaging the pictographs on rocks in Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site, near El Paso, so Dajnowski used spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of their pigments and of the graffiti paint. It’s the same technique used to restore fine art paintings. In his studio, he created mockups, and he and Bartosz experimented with lasers to determine the precise settings for removing only the graffiti layer. It took two years of research to pull it off.

Plenty of new challenges await Dajnowski in his studio. One of the original pair of bovines in Bull and Indian Maiden — stolen from Garfield Park, damaged, and recovered — has sat here patiently for 15 years, awaiting funds to be restored and returned to its partner’s side. (When it went missing, Dajnowski was hired to create a replacement, which now sits in Garfield Park, only for the damaged bull to be discovered in New York.) Two bronze eagles will remain here until money is found to repair the deteriorating twin fountains where they normally perch at Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive. “Each of these projects is like a child to him,” Fus says. “He feels very responsible for doing the right treatment.”

Dajnowski won’t pick a favorite child, but Fountain of Time holds a special place. The logo for his firm is inspired by the monument’s Father Time figure, not just because Dajnowski spent so much time on the project, but because of what it represents. “It’s a symbol of conservation,” he says. “Because time can be a friend or enemy to many things.”

Early this year, on a walk around my neighborhood, I spotted some familiar faces: Miller’s animal sculptures. After 18 years in storage, they had returned to their home near Taylor Street, looking as if no time had passed at all.