Calls to honor 30,000 lives
But NY yet to plan virus memorial
Nearly 30,000 New Yorkers have died since COVID-19 touched down in the city one year ago.
And while a patchwork of painters, poets and everyday citizens have honored the dead in their own way, and the city plans to hold a small memorial vigil next week, New Yorkers wonder when a transcendent touchstone to the tragedy — a soaring monument to the dead and the heroic — will emerge.
Around the world, vast monuments and memorials are being proposed, planned and built. In New York City, the epicenter of the plague that killed more than 500,000 Americans, only vague and limited visions for local tributes — one at a former New Jersey dump, another on Hart Island in the East River — have surfaced.
As the city approaches March 14 — the anniversary of its first death from the coronavirus — officials have yet to convene committees that will hash out ideas for a memorial, a project experts say is key to processing the tragedy.
“Memorials provide society a place to put the grief, a space where we know the lives lost will not be forgotten,” said Alice Greenwald, who heads the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “That’s why the 9/11 memorial and museum are now part of the fabric of our city.”
In Brazil, an undulating 128-foot-long steel sculpture was erected in September at a Rio de Janeiro cemetery where many COVID-19 casualties were buried.
By May 2020, as the pandemic raged, residents of Madrid could visit a black steel sculpture with an eternal flame.
In Uruguay, architectural firm Gomez Platero has proposed a striking World Memorial to the Pandemic platform designed to sit at the edge of an urban waterfront as a reminder “that mankind is not the center of the ecosystem in which we live.”
British artist Jeremy Deller proposed a giant pangolin sculpture, rendered in gold. The animal was once thought to be the source of the coronavirus, and Deller has said the idea for the work was “about thinking of animals as things to be respectful of, rather than to exploit, because they can . . . bring the world to a stop.”
One early plan floated in New York was to erect a memorial on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field where burials nearly tripled last year. Manhattan-based architectural designer John Beckmann wants to install 12 towers of light throughout the island to be illuminated at a designated time of year.
Alternatively, the light tributes could be placed throughout the five boroughs, with the number in each borough a symbolic representation of how many died there.
Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan) has sponsored legislation to form a task force on a Hart Island memorial and another bill that would convene a group to work toward a memorial honoring frontline workers who died of COVID-19.
“The city has not done with COVID what it has done after other diseases, which is to tell the stories of the people we have lost,” Levine said.
It took nearly eight years from the time architect Michael Arad won a public design competition for the 9/11 Memorial in early 2004 until his Reflecting Absence tribute opened on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
“I wanted to capture the enormous loss . . . but also the way in which this city came together to support one another,” Arad told The Post. “Not being able to do that now, to show our love for each other and for our city, is incredibly dispiriting.”
The evening vigil on March 14 will attempt to lift the city’s hearts.
“It’s important that we have a day going forward in the future of the city to always remember what happened, to remember those we lost, and to honor them and to honor their families,” Mayor de Blasio said. “At the same time, it’s a day to remember all the heroism and all the people who did so much good to protect people.”