The Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City
A Teacher's Guide

General Information and Location
Hunger Memorial Location: Corner of Vesey Street and North End Avenue, Manhattan.
Hours: 6 A.M. to 1 A. M.
There is no admission.

Background Information on the Memorial
The Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City was created by artist Brian Tolle to raise awareness of the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) and of the challenge to end hunger in our world. Tolle says, "It's a living alert, a center for hunger around the world." Ground was broken for the Memorial by Governor George Pataki on March 15, 2001. The Governor and President Mary McAleese of the Republic of Ireland dedicated the site on July 16, 2002.

The Memorial is a living site. The landscape will change with the seasons and with the years. The texts will be undated with new information about the Great Irish Famine or about world hunger. The audio tracks in the passage will be a medium for contemporary writers and musicians who have responded to the Great Irish Famine and to hunger in the world today.

When you approach the Memorial from the east:
Approaching the Irish Hunger Memorial from the east, the visitor crosses the limestone quarried in County Kilkenny that is 300 million years old to view a roofless Irish cottage in a landscaped setting. The two-room cottage, a gift of the Slack family of Attymass, Co. Mayo who occupied the cottage till the 1960s. The Slacks trace their occupancy of a cottage on the Attymass site to 1820.

The Slack Cottage was taken apart stone by stone and reassembled on the site where it meets the requirements of the Irish Historic Trust and the New York City Building Code.

The project landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird selected 62 species of Irish flora grown from native seeds for the half-acre landscaped site, an authentic western Irish bogland ecosystem. One-quarter acre of the site is planted with clover in fallow potato ridges that symbolize the empty potato harvests of 1845,1846, 1848 and 1849. The quarter-acre size is significant because of the Gregory Clause added to the Poor Law of 1847 which stipulated that any person occupying more than one-quarter acre was not eligible for any form of government relief. The result was wide-spread eviction and homelessness. The county stones identified in the landscape, a stone from each of Ireland's thirty-two counties, were placed randomly in the field. A map of the location of the county stones can be found in the Irish Memorial brochure.

Visitors can choose to walk to the cottage or to follow the path past the pilgrim stone. Cross-decorated standing stones are found in the west of Ireland and are associated with sites that are considered sacred. The Irish Hunger Memorial pilgrim stone is inscribed with a cross of arcs, a motif of great antiquity that is associated with County Kerry's St. Brendan. Continuing to the cantilevered overlook twenty-five above the ground, the visitor looking south has a panoramic view of the Hudson River that includes Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Turning east, the visitor looks across the site of the World Trade Center to St. Paul's Church, the respite center for 9/11 rescue workers.

When you approach the Memorial from the west:
The western entrance to the Irish Hunger Memorial provides a formal, ceremonial passage that leads to the center of the memorial, the Slack Cottage. This entrance recalls the neolithic passage graves of the Boyne Valley: Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth.

The text around the Memorial:
The landscape is supported on a base faced with layers of polished Kilkenny limestone and glass. Behind the glass bands are some 110 quotations that represent different voices that speak to hunger: legislation, letters, memoirs, parliamentary reports, proverbs, recipes, songs and statistics.

 

Some Facts About the Great Irish Famine

• The Irish potato crop was destroyed by blight four times in five years: 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1849.
• The official population of Ireland in 1841 was 8,175,124; in 1851, it had declined to 6,552,385. The loss of over 1.6 million people to famine-related deaths and to emigration means that one in four people disappeared between 1841 and 1851.

• Unable to pay their rents, many small tenant farmers were evicted. 188,346 families, an estimated 974,930 people were served with eviction notices (1846-48) or actually evicted (1849-54).

 

 

Lessons from the Great Irish Famine that Relate to the Guide

The Great Irish Famine Curriculum Website is: www.emsc.nysed.gov/nysssa/gif/index.html

	Printed Version of Curriculum	WebVersion (PDF format)
New York State Response to the Great Irish Famine	Page 327	Page 312
Creating Broadsheets and Posters for the Irish Relief Committee	Page 559	Page 529
New Yorkers Provide Relief During the Great Irish Famine	Page 555	Page 526
Public Monuments: Remembering the Past	Page 925	Page 871
Pre-Famine Housing Conditions in Ireland	Page 159	Page 151
Designing Relief Legislation	Page 483	Page 455
Interpretations of the Great Irish Famine: Written and Visual	Page 523	Page 493
Wave of Evictions	Page 529	Page 498
Creating Monuments to the Past	Page 933	Page 879