Trivia is No Trivial Pursuit for a New York Archivist

When Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke recently locked lips for a steamy film kiss in Tompkins Square Park, the New York City tabloids were off and running with speculation about a real-life romance.

Jonathan Kuhn, the resident trivia buff for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, saw something different in a New York Post photograph of the smooch: a piece of Manhattan history.

Paltrow and Hawke were kissing over the park’s century-old Temperance Fountain, erected in 1888 by the anti-alcohol Moderation Society. It’s just the sort of thing the 38-year-old Kuhn tends to notice.

He can rattle off a detailed history of most any landmark, monument or park in the city, from the Bronx to Coney Island. As the department’s art and antiquities director, monuments curator and historian since 1987, he is helping people compile genealogies, track down old photos or simply bone up on history.

“People will call and they’ll say, ‘I have this sort of strange question,’ and I’ll say, ‘No question is strange,’ ” he said. “But sometimes they are.”

There was the call from a former FBI agent who hoped to find pictures of a swimming and comedy group he had performed with in the 1940s as a boy in Queens.

“Well, I had seen these pictures for years, of kids in striped bathing suits doing funny things,” Kuhn said. “I was able to find photos of him and his brother and his friends. That was a very personal request.”

Oddball errands are Kuhn’s specialty.

He tracked down a stolen pair of metal glasses once welded on a Union Square statue of Mahatma Gandhi. And he helped a Brooklyn woman find a press release describing a Central Park children’s singing contest she won in 1940.

At the request of an Indiana widow, he biked to Battery Park’s East Coast War Memorial and found her late husband’s name engraved on the Manhattan monument’s list of World War II casualties.

“It’s as if after more than 50 years I found my husband’s grave,” the woman wrote after Kuhn sent her a letter describing the monument.

Kuhn, who has a master’s degree in art history, figures he’s visited about 600 of the city’s 1,600 parks since he moved here in 1980. He still spends much of his free time exploring.

The most popular query?

Easy, says Kuhn: Central Park’s statue of Balto, a sled dog that carried medicine to Alaska during a 1925 diphtheria epidemic, draws frequent questions from people who have heard of the dog’s heroics.

Kuhn is reluctant to pick his favorite park, although Brooklyn’s Owl’s Head Park and Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx are high on his list.

A park, he says, can be a refuge for harried New Yorkers: “Even in hard times. . . . it’s a place where people go to escape whatever ails them.”