To see gargantuan steel sculptures fashioned by Richard Serra, you could visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, or the Dia: Beacon, 60 miles north of New York City. Or you could go to a crane yard near a heating-oil terminal in Port Morris, an industrial corner of the South Bronx.

There, amid belching smokestacks and clanging delivery trucks, sits artwork made by Mr. Serra, a secret grace note in a decidedly ungraceful block. The briny air from the river just steps away blows across the steel plates, bent in a trademark Serra arc that would be recognized on the moon  which, in the art world, Port Morris might as well be.

The piece  five plates, about one and a half stories high  is not displayed for public view or assembled as Mr. Serra intended. It stands behind a raggedy chain-link fence while a stray black-and-white cat stands watch. Cranes and falling-down sheds surround it. It has sat there for years, waiting to be delivered to its owner, said Joe Vilardi of Budco Enterprises, a Long Island rigging company that placed the steel in the Bronx lot and has long worked with Mr. Serra.

“It is parts of a sculpture that are just in storage right now,” Mr. Vilardi said.

Mr. Serra, 70, is famous for his massive steel sculptures, which were the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. He is notorious for being particular about how his pieces are displayed. In the 1980s, Mr. Serra refused to move a sculpture that had been installed in Foley Square in Manhattan, declaring, “To remove the work is to destroy it.”