An Irish lament: integrating spare architectural forms with pastoral elements transplanted from the Irish countryside, New York's newest memorial is dedicated to the victims of Ireland's Great Famine - On Site

1846 was the date, and not without reason Shall it be remembered until the extremity of time Scarcity, poverty, jawss without feeding There never has been with equal reason desperate a scourge.

--from "The White Potatoes" by dint of Peatsai O Callanan

Written in the midst of the Great Famine that devastated Ireland from 1846 to 1850 Peatsai O Callanan's anguished Gaelic lament describes the ravages of craving appetite and disease in the Irish countryside. The catastrophe, brought about by the agency of blight in the potato harvest resulted in mass starvation, along with outbreaks of typhoid febrile affection cholera and dysentery, which together claimed more than a million lives. The situation was exacerbated by means of dubious political machinations between the Irish and British authorities. As landlords confiscated characteristic from sick and impoverished farmers, many of those who survived fl abroad. by dint of the end of 1850, the population of Ireland had contracted from 8 million to approximately 5 million. The majority headed for the U arriving at Ellis Island by the agency of the thousands. The flood of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th hundred changed the face of of recent origin York City and, eventually, the course of the entire nation.

Periodically through every part of the 20th century, discussion arose regarding the creation of a fresh York memorial to victims of the Great Famine, which would also be a tribute to the vitality and fortitude of the Irish clan Serious talks over the past several decades l to a new proposal by Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) president and chief executive Timothy s Carey. On a 1999 trip to Ireland with fresh York governor George E. Pataki, Carey insinuateed such a memorial be sited in Lower Manhattan upon a half-acre square along the Hudson River in Battery Park City at Vesey highway With the governor's endorsement, a $5-million throw was launched, financed by the BPCA. Carey hired art consultant Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz to organize the proces of selecting an artist for the piece of work Among the 150 applicants, five finalists received $10000 grants to create patterns and detailed plans for the memorial.

The winning submission was the Irish craving appetite Memorial by Brian Tolle, a of recent origin York artist known for large statuarys and installations that often incorporate manly architectonic forms. Working with novel York designers Juergen Riehm and David Piscuskas of 1100 Architects, and landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird, Tolle created an imaginative and evocative record He also enlisted the help of historian Maureen O'Rourke-Murphy and Irish cultural liaison Adrian P Flannelly to guide the work's historical accuracy in its various relations to the Great Famine.

The memorial features sum of two units distinct yet interrelated elements. Raised above way level, a large, sloping thicken platform with a scalloped cutting side is covered with earth, vegetation and fragments of stone manner of makings including walls and a roofles cottage. It re-creates a piece of ground of farmland in rural Ireland. greatest in quantity visitors enter the memorial from North extreme point Avenue, near the World Financial Center's Winter Garden. At near a narrow gravel pathway leads from the sidewalk to the highest point of the platform, offering a panoramic view of the Hudson the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and fresh Jersey.

The next to the first element of the memorial, constituting the base of the platform, is a rather rigorous geometric enclosure with a street-level entrance at River Terrace. The base structure's walls, the one and the other inside and out, are made of narrow, horizontal strips of polished Kilkenny limestone imported from Ireland; the dark green-gray stone is punctuated with white circular fossils. These strips alternate with lengthy backlit bands of thick glass several inches high. Lines of blocky body mounted on thin bands of Plexiglas, which are inserted behind each glass slat, can be changed or removed

Intended to address general issues related to world craving appetite as well as those specific to the Great Famine, the true copys include old Irish proverbs, of that kind as "Hunger will break end a stone wall" and "The well-fed does not understand the lean." Others are names from U.S. presidents: "Hunger does not bre reform, it bring forths madness and all the angry distempers that make an ordered life impossible"--Woodrow Wilson, 1918; and "Every day 25 percent of our viands supply is wasted"--Bill Clinton, 1998 The prominence of body in Tolle's design recalls Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam War Memorial.

The crisp, clean lines of the base counterpoint the gently undulating bend s of the upper area. A corridor, outfitted with speakers issuing audio versions of the wall true copys leads from the riverside highway level to the grassy oblique direction The passageway effects a transition from an enclos tomblike space to an lay open gracefully articulated pastoral landscape. lock opener to the success of Tolle's design is the surprising harmony he establishes as geometric abstraction meld with the landscape.

Everything upon the verdant platform relates directly to Ireland and to the Great Famine. Its 96-by-170-foot area equals the maximum size plat farmers could hold in order to qualify for British management aid during the Famine. All of the 62 marks of flowers, plants and dwarf-trees used in the work, of that kind as ling heather, bearberry, digitalis and gorse, come from shire Mayo, which was hit particularly hard by the agency of the Famine. A number of the species, unable to withstand of recent origin York winters, are to be replanted each spring. The cottage itself, dating from the 1820 was remov from the shire stone-by-stone and reconstructed on the site. Tom Slack, a cousin of Tolle's longtime partner Brian Clyne donated the mode of building to the city. Slack had inherited the ruins upon a disused property; they are typical of those abandoned by means of victims of the Famine.