Memory and Justice: www.memoryandjustice.org

Design

Design of Irish Hunger Memorial

The artist Brian Tolle and the landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird designed the Irish Hunger Memorial. It consists of a half-acre of land, with 32 stones from the counties of Ireland and 62 species of Irish flora grown from native seeds. One-quarter of the acre is planted with clover in fallow potato ridges to symbolize the empty potato harvests of the 1840s. The quarter acre refers to the clauses that Sir William Gregory added to the Poor Law of 1847: it stipulated that any person occupying a quarter acre of land was not eligible for government relief.

Approaching the site from the north, visitors enter a tunnel that brings them to a reconstructed cottage. This roofless two-room 1820 house, donated by the Slack family of Attymass, County Mayo, was taken apart stone by stone in Ireland, transported across the Atlantic, and reassembled in New York.

The landscape is supported on a base of polished limestone from Kilkenny, engraved with 110 quotations from legislations, letters, memoirs, parliamentary reports, proverbs, recipes, songs and statistics all oriented around the subject of hunger.

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Related Site

Irish Hunger Memorial

References

“Public Art: Memorials, Irish Hunger Memorial.” Battery Park City Authority.