Cleveland OKs design for Rice memorial
— Members of the city’s landmarks commission Thursday unanimously approved a design for a formal, permanent memorial to Tamir Rice, the 12-yearold Cleveland boy shot and killed by police Nov. 22, 2014.
The memorial — which could be one of the first professionally designed permanent markers in the nation to commemorate a recent victim of police violence against Black people — would occupy the former site of the Cudell Recreation Center gazebo, in front of which Rice was killed.
Rice was playing with a pellet gun when he was shot by officer Timothy Loehmann.
Protests over police killings of unarmed Blacks — a growing list that includes Tamir Rice — have spread across the country and around the world this summer after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Floyd’s death has galvanized a shift in public views about persistent anti-Black racism in America.
The design for the Tamir Rice project, crafted by Cleveland landscape architect Jayme Schwartzberg and New Orleans landscape architect Diane Jones Allen, centers on a fourby-four-foot square of dark, polished granite, set flush to the ground, that would bear an etched likeness of Rice along with a written statement about his death.
The plaque, set within a small paved plaza, would be connected by a curving, dry riverbed of stones to a nearby butterfly garden, created by volunteers in the summer of 2015 as an earlier effort to create a memorial.
A separate plaque would be installed in the curving pathway to honor Tamir Rice’s older sister, Tajai, who was knocked to the ground, handcuffed by police and held less than 10 feet from where her brother lay dying.
The memorial site lies between the Cudell Recreation Center building, 1910
West Blvd., Cleveland, and the nearby Marion C. Seltzer Elementary School.
The landscaping for the memorial would be graded to channel rainwater gently from Tamir Rice’s likeness to the plants in the butterfly garden. The memorial plaque would be flanked by two flowering redbud trees that would produce white blossoms in the spring.
“I think this is an absolutely terrific design,‘’ Stephen Harrison, a member of the commission, said in virtual meeting, held online Thursday morning. “I want to congratulate all the designers who worked on it. It is sensitive and retains its poignancy. It actually in fact enhances the natural landscape that we see” around it.
Allen and Schwartzberg said the design grew out of conversations with Samaria Rice, Tamir Rice’s mother, who is seeking to create permanent memorial at the site of her son’s death.
“We really thought about how we create a sacred space and a moment of sanctity in a very busy public landscape,‘’ Allen said.
Rice did not respond to phone calls Thursday morning seeking comment about the approval of the design, and its timeline and funding.
Schwartzberg said after the meeting that Rice would like to have the memorial site completed as soon as possible, pending agreements with the city over establishment of a permanent fund for maintenance, and the language to be inscribed on the plaque.
She said she didn’t know of any other permanent memorials that have commemorated victims of police violence since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.