In 1980 about one in seven Americans claimed Irish ancestry, and more than 40 million Americans described themselves as predominantly Irish. According to the 1990 census, almost 800,000 residents of New York City and 2.8 million residents of New York State trace their ancestry to Ireland.
Today I finally went to visit the Irish Famine Memorial, a strange structure that has not been warmly embraced downtown.
Dedicated in July 2002, the Irish Famine Memorial located in Battery Park City is devoted to raising public awareness of the events that led to the Great Irish Famine and Migration of 1845-1852. The memorial represents a rural Irish landscape with an abandoned stone cottage, stone walls, fallow potato fields, and native Irish wildflowers like those found on the north Connacht wetlands of Ireland.
It feels pretty strange to walk along this tiny green landscape and yet feel acutely aware of being in downtown Manhattan - sort of like being suspended at the top of a Ferris wheel and peering down at what used to look familiar. At no point could I imagine myself in Ireland.
The 5 million-dollar monument seems a surreal but intriguing intruder in Manhattan. We duck under the façade's cantilevered "awning" through the ground-level tunnel and pace some 8,000 linear feet of text on the terror and misery of famines worldwide, written in thin bands radiating from its backlit walls. Emerging, finally, on the memorial's eastern side, we mount the grassy hillside to its stone Irish cottage, then, walk to its summit to view the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on the distant Jersey shore.
Read Hunger for Memorials: New York's Monument to the Irish Famine, by Jane Holtz Kay
2 comments:
Wonderful post. I read that Ireland is the biggest modern-day donor of famine relief, per capita, in the world, for obvious reasons.
I couldn't help wincing, though, as you mentioned the native Irish plants at the site. Some historians speculate that the potato blight was accidentally imported in a botanical sample sent to a scientist. It's amazing to think that a country could lose half its population because of some plant tissue in an envelope, no?
Amazing and terrifying.
I thought that the article by Jane Holtz Kay sums up the experience of visiting the memorial very well (those were her words at the end).
I’d like to learn more about the Irish famine, and I was struck by the following (also from the governor’s press release):
“In 1996, the Governor signed a law making instruction on the mass starvation in Ireland a part of New York State curriculum. New York schools are now required by the Board of Regents to teach courses in patriotism, citizenship and human rights issues, devoting particular attention to the study of genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
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