Less than a year after it was opened by the President, Mrs McAleese, the Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower Manhattan's Battery Park City has been closed for several weeks to allow for extensive renovation.
The stone walls around the tilted "post-Famine" field are being rebuilt, and the edges of the field dug up to repair a faulty drainage system.
The renovation will cost $150,000 and the memorial will not be open until the middle of May, said Mr Tim Carey, president of Battery Park City Authority which funded the $5 million project.
Even before it was opened on July 16th, 2002 at a ceremony attended by New York Mayor Mr Michael Bloomberg and Governor Mr George Pataki, the ambitious and highly-praised memorial showed signs of troublesome flaws.
The most obvious was water from the drainage and irrigation system seeping through the concrete of the 25-foot overhang and dripping onto the pavement below. The field, with 62 species of Irish fauna, needs constant irrigation during New York's hot summer.
"The design and engineering didn't mix well," said Mr Carey, who explained that the mortar in the wall around the field, built to look like a typical Irish dry-stone wall, expanded and contracted in winter frosts and some of the stones became loose. The cement is being replaced with a substance using lime from the state of Georgia.
The placing around the quarter-acre field of one large stone from each county of Ireland had also not worked out well as visitors tended to tramp over the field to find their county stone, Mr Carey said. These would be relocated and new signage incorporated so people would stay on the path and not damage the potato drills. The path through the field is being replaced with gravel underlay to cope with visitors walking through the memorial in all types of weather.
"We've learned a lot about the site since July," said Mr Carey who explained that it was a unique "living, breathing landscape" which was developed as it went forward.
The memorial, which contains a ruined cottage from Co Mayo, is situated on the edge of the Hudson River with views from the highest point of Ellis Island, where many immigrants fleeing Ireland were processed.
Designed by Mr Brian Tolle, it is intended to raise awareness of the Famine of 1845-1850 and the crisis of hunger worldwide.
Another problem is keeping New Yorkers from misusing the monument. People sometimes cycle up through the field, which was not acceptable, said Mr Carey.