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

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 there were no signs anywhere indicating its whereabouts, and no one, least of all a cop, who had a clue about what or where it was.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. Come spring, memory buds. Funeral barrows and mounds were among the first marks made by man on the northern European landscape, and Brian Tolle, the designer of the memorial, had the inspired idea of creating an urban tumulus--in this case, a cantilevered platform of verdure supported by a concrete base. Into this micro-landscape, planted with species native to Mayo (one of the hardest hit of the western counties) and strewn with fieldstones engraved with the names of all the counties of Ireland, is packed the memory of the calamity.

A walk up the hill becomes a journey from Old World ruin to New World redemption. At the bottom stands a ruined stone cottage, dismantled in Mayo and reassembled here, its end gables and hearthstone intact. It is roofless, a reminder of the evictions that followed the famine. At the brow of the hill is a rough-hewn standing stone, a cross cut into its face. From the retaining wall at the top, the view opens to the glittering river, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island--and the cranes and towers of American commerce on the New Jersey bank. The experience of the place suddenly doubles in significance: both trauma and hope, departure and arrival, exile and rescue. Walking the memorial's perimeter, one becomes aware that what appears from the front to be a meadow turns out, when seen from the side, to be ship-shaped, the prow pointing toward the Hudson.

By having the landscape virtually enact the story, Tolle neatly sidestepped the figurative-abstract dilemma facing designers of historical memorials. Figurative monuments are habitually presented as the populist ...