A PATCH OF EARTH.(monument to Irish potato famine of 19th Century)(Brief Article)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-AUG-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

What does a New York lament look like? Green--at any rate, if you're Irish. Down by the unhealed scar of lower Manhattan, at the northern tip of Battery Park City, a brilliant, heavily irrigated field of clover, bog grass, rushes, and heather, strewn with rocks, mourns the one million dead, and the one and a half million uprooted, of the Irish potato famine of 1845-52. Despite the fact that the Hunger Memorial, at North End Avenue, tilts up sharply over the Hudson, no one seems to be able to find it. Nancy, an Irish New Yorker, had heard about it from Joan, who had heard about it at home in County Mayo, but both women had a devil of a time tracking it down last week, and complained that...

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