Among the latest Irish arrivals in New York City is a 170-year-old wreck from Attymass, Co Mayo. The two-roomed, roofless ruin was removed in its entirety from its rural setting to be rebuilt as part of a $4.7 million Irish Hunger Memorial commemorating the Famine. The stone cottage, built in the 1830s, was a gift from Tom Slack of Co Mayo.
The half-acre memorial site, which will occupy a corner of Vesey Street and North End Avenue in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, will include the ruined fieldstone cottage, abandoned fields of overgrown potato furrows and rocky heartlands of indigenous grasses, weeds and wild flowers meant to evoke the desolation of the Irish Famine. Visitors will pass by 5,000 linear feet of contemporary accounts on the Hunger etched along the memorial's base before entering the ruined cottage. From there, a pathway will lead them through the Irish landscape, ending at an overlook with views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The memorial will be dedicated on St Patrick's Day 2002.
"It's a strange piece of history - I cannot really grasp it being as historic as it really is. I'm delighted," said Slack, who has never been to the US. "I think it's grand - it will always be a link for the next generation living here and in the US."
Slack explained that his second cousin, New Yorker Brian Clyne, had asked him to donate the cottage. Clyne designed the memorial's computer renderings for the winning proposal, and his grandmother, who had lived in the cottage, was an immigrant to the US.
The derelict cottage was of no great value to him, Slack said, as he had moved out of the seven-generation family home in 1963. While some locals are bemused that his property has been transferred across the pond, most people are "very enthusiastic". The area in Attymass where the cottage was will now be fenced off and remain unused.
"I'm sure my cousins in New York are thrilled," Slack said.
"I sent an Irish mason to Ireland to oversee the disassembling and the reassembling" of the hundreds of stones, said artist Brian Tolle, who conceived the project and won the commission last March. The year-long design competition was organised by the Battery Park City Authority, the agency funding the project. It is expected to take approximately eight weeks to rebuild the pre-Famine cottage, which Tolle described as central to the memorial.
The idea was commissioned by Governor George Pataki in March 2000 when he asked James Gill, the authority's chairman, to oversee the design of a contemplative space devoted to raising public awareness of the events that led to the Famine and the subsequent Irish migration to New York City. In 1996, Pataki signed a law requiring the New York State school curriculum to include teaching about the Famine, the Holocaust and genocide. Battery Park City is also the home of The Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Tolle visited Ireland in March to look at several structures before deciding that the cottage owned by Slack was just right. The building was within three inches of fitting the artist's original scheme and came from the village that reported the first official Famine deaths. It was, suitably, a gift from the side of a family that hadn't emigrated to the other side that had, said Tolle, who lives in New York City.
"There have been so many odd coincidences," Tolle said. "Everything is falling into place. There is such a good feeling surrounding the memorial."
The artist's idea for the winning design was inspired by a visit to Slievemore, the Famine-deserted Achill Island village, last year. "I climbed over the hill and looked back over the abandoned village. Never before had I witnessed a more potent or more powerful memorial," he said.
Tolle had been anxious about the house that would eventually be used in the memorial. "I didn't want to simulate a house, and didn't want to take one either. But when we stumbled upon the Slack house, the idea of protecting and preserving a very simple structure that talks about big things - like the Irish Famine and world hunger - made it most appropriate," said the artist, who has exhibited internationally.
A memorial like this, incorporating landscape, architecture and sculpture, has never been tried before; it is "redefining what a monument is", according to Tolle.
Unexpectedly, the more contemporary Irish problem of foot-and-mouth disease posed a problem. "Everything had to be power-washed" before leaving Ireland, said Tolle, who had worried about whether the cottage would be allowed to enter the US.
It is the Battery Park City Authority's mission to provide public cultural amenities on the 30-acre site, said Timothy Carey, the authority's president who led the selection team to Ireland to choose the cottage in May. The memorial's location is significant because so many Irish immigrants first arrived in New York City and because the metropolis attracts huge numbers of visitors from around the world. More than four million people visit the nearby Statue of Liberty every year, Carey added.
"We hope the emotional experience of being in this place will show people that hunger being used as a political weapon is unacceptable anywhere in the world."
An audio recording will inform visitors about modern famines around the world. Carey would also like to see, funds permitting, a famine research centre positioned near the memorial.