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In Remembrance of Sorrow From Other Times
January 25, 2002
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
YOU will never forget Sept. 11. But there are already more
than 40,000 New Yorkers who will never remember. And their
numbers grow every hour.
Not yet born at the time of the attack, they represent the
ultimate audience for any memorial: those without personal
recollection to whom the past must be transmitted. In the
overheated debate over the remembrance of Sept. 11, it is
worth pondering how other memorials in New York have
conveyed their message across the generations.
And it can elevate the soul to step away from the chatter
and partake in the contemplative hush that the best
memorials offer.
Created out of grief or resolve, to advance a political
message or underscore ethnic heritage, memorials fill the
city. Those commemorating large-scale tragedy assume an
astonishing variety of forms, from a 148-foot Doric column
to a pocketful of blackened dimes and nickels. But each
embodies the notion that even the most appalling
catastrophe is part of a living continuum.
They are also appropriately wrenching. One cannot turn away
unchastened from the blistered statue of Shinran Shonin
outside the New York Buddhist Church on Riverside Drive, a
figure of gently imposing nobility that somehow survived
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Nor can one gaze over the cobalt chop of New York Harbor,
framed by the eight granite pylons of the East Coast
Memorial in Battery Park, without shivering inconsolably
for the 4,597 service members who perished along the
Atlantic Coast in World War II. Their names, ranks and home
states are inscribed on the 19-foot pylons. Coxswain,
yeoman, apprentice seaman, radarman, torpedoman's mate,
quartermaster, water tender, ship's cook. All lost.
At the head of the pylons, a fierce bronze eagle lays a
wreath on an oceanic grave. But this is not what gives this
memorial its real power. It is the enumeration. Names, real
names, attest to the magnitude of sacrifice.
This lesson was absorbed at the Vietnam Veterans Plaza on
Water Street, just north of Broad Street, in Lower
Manhattan. The original memorial, dedicated in 1985, is a
66-foot wall of glass brick on which have been etched words
written by and about service members in Vietnam. Among them
may be the most poignant phrase on any New York memorial -
"And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the
war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes
you left behind" - from a poem written in 1970 by Maj.
Michael Davis O'Donnell, three months before he was killed.
The original memorial did not explicitly acknowledge the
role of New Yorkers in the war. Now it does, with the
addition of 12 small steel and granite steles leading to
the glass wall, inscribed with the names of 1,741 service
members from the city who died as a result of their duty in
Vietnam.
A large map has also been added to guide those for whom
names like Saigon, the Mekong Delta, Hue, Tan Son Nhut,
D.M.Z. and Parrot's Beak may be unfamiliar. More than
one-third of all Americans today were not alive in 1975,
when the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
In 38 years, if present trends continue, half the
population will have been born after Sept. 11, 2001, says
Prof. Andrew A. Beveridge of Queens College, using Census
Bureau projections.
That raises a fundamental question about designing a
memorial: should it tell the story literally or evoke the
tragedy abstractly, allowing viewers to bring their own
knowledge to the site and inspiring them to learn more once
they have seen it? Today's memorial builders must also
reach a generation to which history has been spoon-fed as
entertainment and spectacle.
Relics as Reminder
The Irish Hunger Memorial, now under construction at
Battery Park City, will recall the devastating potato
famine of the mid-19th century by conjuring the Irish
countryside with potato furrows, stone walls and indigenous
plants.
"We wanted to make sure that this memorial told the story,
so that when people see this in 100 years, they'll walk
away knowing what it represented," said Timothy S. Carey,
president of the Battery Park City Authority, which is
financing the memorial.
By incorporating as its centerpiece an actual stone cottage
from County Mayo, the memorial also reflects the quest - at
least as old as the veneration of saintly relics - for
something tangible to connect us with what was lost.
Relics can be found in surprising places.
On the park
side of the Maine Monument at Columbus Circle, out of view
to most passers-by, is a tablet cast in metal salvaged from
the U.S.S. Maine, which exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898,
killing 260. The plaque depicts a sorrowful liberty figure
watching the battleship sink below the waves.
More modest but far more stirring is an 8-by-14-inch plaque
in the chapel of New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn.
Embossed on it are four dimes and five nickels that were in
the pocket of 11-year-old Stephen Baltz, who was traveling
from Chicago on a United Air Lines DC-8 that crashed into
Park Slope in 1960, after colliding over New York Harbor
with a T.W.A. Super Constellation. It was at the time the
worst disaster in aviation history.
The horror was compounded by the shocking sight of a giant,
streamlined, white-red-and-blue tail fin in the middle of
Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue, the words "United" and
"Mainliner" plainly visible.
In all, 135 people were killed in the air and on the
ground. Stephen alone briefly survived. He died at
Methodist Hospital the next day. His father, William S.
Baltz, gave the coins to the chaplain's poor box.
Fifteen blocks away, at the site, there is no formal
marker, but there is ample evidence of the impact. The
Gothic-style Pillar of Fire Church at 123 Sterling Place
was destroyed that morning and never rebuilt. The lot is
still empty. At the corner, a modern one-story orange-brick
building replaced the four-story McCaddin Funeral Home,
which was hit by the wreckage.
Building With a Dark Past
Some of New York's most painful monuments are equally
inconspicuous.
"You saw these young women literally ablaze flying out of
the windows," recalled Rose Freedman, who survived the
Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 and lived until
last year. Given the infamy of this disaster, in which 146
workers died, one might imagine that the building at
Washington Place and Greene Street was itself consumed.
Not at all. It is used today by New York University, with
biology laboratories on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors, where
the fire raged. Though it is otherwise virtually anonymous
among turn-of-the-century loft buildings, its history is at
least noted on two small plaques at the base.
In contrast, no sign marks the former St. Mark's Lutheran
Church, 325 East Sixth Street, which is now the Community
Synagogue Max D. Raiskin Center.
Upon no single house of worship in New York has tragedy
ever fallen harder than it did in 1904 on the German
congregation that worshiped in this modest Greek Revival
sanctuary. Off to an annual Sunday-school picnic aboard the
General Slocum, a coal-fired excursion steamer, 784 members
of St. Mark's - almost all children and women - perished
when the ship caught fire.
The total death toll was 1,021; until Sept. 11, the
greatest of any single day in New York history.
In nearby Tompkins Square Park stands a nine-foot stele of
pink marble depicting a boy and girl gazing over the water.
He holds a hoop, which seems to form a halo around her
head. Time has worn the stone to ghostly softness but one
can still read, "They were earth's purest children young
and fair."
`Rebels! Turn Out Your Dead!' There is no such gentleness
at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park,
Brooklyn. Instead, a Doric column as tall as a 15-story
building erupts from the hilltop, startling in its
prominence.
During the Revolutionary War, as many as 11,500 American
prisoners died aboard British ships anchored in nearby
Wallabout Bay. "We bury 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 men a day,"
wrote one prisoner aboard the most notorious vessel, the
Jersey. "We have 200 more sick and falling sick every day;
the sickness is yellow fever, small-pox and in short
everything else that can be mentioned. Our morning's
salutation is: `Rebels! Turn out your dead!' "
The remains were transferred in 1908 to a crypt set among
broad staircases and terraces. Only as one ascends the
hillside does the next flight of stairs come into view, so
the journey up to the brazier-topped column seems to
lengthen with every step forward; surely a metaphor for the
endless rigors of imprisonment.
As the column's gigantic concave flutes catch or block the
pale yellow winter sun, they create a faceted transition
from light to dark, life to death.
The entire setting can induce melancholy: maple and oak
leaves scatter as if souls were stirring, barren branches
reach out as if in supplication. And there is something
missing in the panorama of Lower Manhattan. More
particularly, there are two things missing.
'No More Hiroshimas'
The most catastrophic event
memorialized in New York City occurred half a world away:
the bombing of Hiroshima by the United States in World War
II.
Some 150,000 people died.
Ninety percent of the buildings in the city collapsed or
burned.
But on Mitaki Hill, about one and a half miles from ground
zero, something survived: a 15-foot-high,
two-and-a-half-ton bronze statue of Shinran Shonin, the
13th-century founder of the Jodoshinshu Buddhist sect,
carrying a staff and clad in robe, sandals and a
mushroomlike broad-brimmed hat, known as an amigasa.
"The statue stood alone in the middle of all the burning,"
said the Rev. T. Kenjitsu Nakagaki, resident minister of
the New York Buddhist Church, where the statue now stands.
"This gave the people some kind of hope."
It is now the focus of an annual peace gathering held on
Aug. 5, during which a bell is tolled at 7:15 p.m. At that
moment in Japan, it is 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, the hour that
the bomb dropped.
The statue was brought to this country by Seiichi Hirose,
an Osaka businessman, who was responsible for its original
installation in 1937. Accompanied by gongs, incense and
children in traditional dress, he unveiled the statue in
its new home in 1955, hoping - in the spirit of "no more
Hiroshimas" - that it would serve as an enduring religious
symbol of peace and serenity.
The date was Sept. 11.
Conveying a Message of Loss, Grief or Resolve
Given New
York's role as a national focal point, it is not surprising
that the city is filled with memorials to the tragedies of
war and other cataclysmic events that have touched many
lives. Here are the ones in the article on memorials:
BROWN BUILDING, New York University, 29 Washington Place,
Greenwich Village. Site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company
fire of 1911.
EAST COAST MEMORIAL (1961), Battery Park, Lower Manhattan.
World War II memorial. Gehron & Seltzer, architects; Albino
Manca, sculptor.
IRISH HUNGER MEMORIAL (2002), Vesey Green, Battery Park
City, Lower Manhattan. Brian Tolle, artist; 1100
Architects, architects; Gail Eileen Wittwer, landscape
architect.
MAINE MONUMENT (1913), Columbus Circle, Central Park.
Memorial to the battleship Maine. H. van Buren Magonigle,
architect; Attilio Piccirilli, sculptor; Charles Keck,
designer of the plaque.
PRISON SHIP MARTYRS MONUMENT (1908), Fort Greene Park, Fort
Greene, Brooklyn. Revolutionary War memorial. McKim, Mead &
White, architects.
SHINRAN SHONIN (1937), New York Buddhist Church, 332
Riverside Drive, near 105th Street, Upper West Side. World
War II memorial. The statue was moved from Hiroshima in
1955.
STEPHEN BALTZ MEMORIAL, New York Methodist Hospital, 506
Sixth Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn. Memorial for a plane
crash in 1960. A small plaque on the rear wall of Phillips
Chapel, reached through the Miner Pavilion entrance.
SLOCUM MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN (1906), Tompkins Square Park, East
Village. Bruno Louis Zimm, sculptor. Nearby, at 325 East
Sixth Street, is the former home of St. Mark's Lutheran
Church, many of whose members perished aboard the General
Slocum steamer in 1904.
VIETNAM VETERANS PLAZA (1985), 55 Water Street, Lower
Manhattan. Peter Wormser, William Britt Fellows and Joseph
Ferrandino, designers of the original; E. Timothy Marshall
& Associates, designers of the 2001 renovation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/arts/design/25MEMO.html?ex=1012962237&ei=1&en=e9d5949f39a9d3bf
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