Pictures 20: Irish Hunger Memorial and Castle Clinton

While tooling around Lower Manhattan, we went to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which my mom first showed me back in May, as well as Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park. As you will see, they are two very unique and very different monuments, both of which I liked a lot. We visited these sites on June 16, 2010.


Approaching the Irish Hunger Memorial from the west.

7 more images below the jump. Click any image to see it larger on Photobucket.


The monument's illuminated walls feature lines of text, mostly newspaper accounts from the time, describing the death tolls of the Irish famine. Other text includes quotes and sayings.




The main body of the memorial is a reconstructed stone cottage imported from Ireland. The built-up land around it is planted with vegetation native to Ireland.


A walkway through the illuminated hallway, through the cottage and around the mound of earth brings you to the upper platform visible in the first picture.

The memorial is really quite poignant (I find I keep using that word in my travels, but it's really true) - and, as explained on this site, it sits on a half-acre of land - which is significant because the Irish Poor Law stated that anyone who owned more than a half-acre of land was not eligible for relief.

A few years ago, I went to a reading by an Irish poet - maybe Eavan Boland? - in Santa Fe, and she told of old roads that snake through Ireland, which start nowhere and end nowhere, that the English made Irish people build to earn money to be able to buy food. In a skewed version of something akin to the CCC, Irish poor were invited to work in fabricated jobs, but the employers and lawmakers neglected to notice that the people were already poor, staving and freezing. Many of them were too far gone for the eventual paycheck and even more eventual food to be of any help. So, as for the roads - when the workers inevitably died, the roads just ceased to be built - and it became all the more apparent that the British didn't intend for the roads to lead anywhere, they just needed work to give to the Irish.

Also in Battery Park is Castle Clinton National Monument, an NPS site that most people who have visited Battery Park probably didn't even notice. The fortress-like site was originally built to defend New York Harbor during the War or 1812, and over time it also served as an opera house, a pre-Ellis Island immigration station and an aquarium.


This diorama inside the monument shows what the site was like when it was first built, on a filler island in the harbor.


This aerial shot from the National Parks website shows what the site looks like now. (By the way, speaking of filling the island in - did you hear about the ship they found at Ground Zero?)


Many of the people walking through Castle Clinton had no idea they were in a National Monument. Patrick and I went to the information booth to stamp our passports, and people coming up to the rangers mostly just asked them where to get on the ferry for the Statue of Liberty and when the next boat was leaving. It was a bummer to see how unobservant they were!


Even seeing a cannon hangin' out in the Battery wasn't enough to get some people to ask "Wait... Where am I?"