“Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it?”

John O’Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

If we are blessed with such kinship, then the Irish Hunger Memorial is a place of its embrace. This small. lush pocket, off New York City’s Battery Park City Esplanade, calls to me. I breathe more deeply here.

On a summer day, the brilliant green landscape has a wildness not seen in other seasons. Vines overflow, yellows and oranges are bursting. Flowers grow out of seemingly inhospitable crevices in the stone walls. It always feels windy at the top of this quarter-acre, which is cantilevered above a foundation and tunnel, with a breeze coming off the Hudson River.

Standing at certain places and looking up at the furrowing hillside and the stone walls, you can forget you’re in Lower Manhattan. It’s hard to believe that skyscrapers, hundreds of residences, and traffic are so nearby. I love its beauty and quiet.

Yet in its grassy ruts are stories of the fallow potato fields that the Irish knew only too well in suffering and dying during the famine of the 1840s and early 1850s (see “Springtime at the Irish Hunger Memorial” for an earlier visit and background). More than a million died of starvation and disease, and hundreds of thousands left Ireland for other lands, mostly the United States. New York Harbor, where so many arrived, is within sight of the top of this memorial. Closing my eyes and feeling the wind here, I always think of that land in Ireland long ago.

Artist Brian Tolle, who designed the Irish Hunger Memorial, landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird, and the firm 1100 Architect created a setting and land to evoke that time and place. The stone walls bring to mind an observation, inscribed with others on the walls of the memorial’s tunnel below, by Richard Hamilton, a Poor Law inspector: “Nothing but the walls of the houses remaining, the inhabitants being scattered through the country seeking shelter where they best could find it.” Summer’s growth sparks a question: Did the blooms of wildflowers feel comforting or bittersweet, or both, at a time when the potato crop was blighted by an airborne fungus?

Along with the thoughts it inspires of that land so long ago, this memorial is a timeless place where we can, as O’Donohue encourages, be awakened by beauty and be reverent.

In photographs and a slide show, I’ve sought to capture this place and its detail in ways that allow the view and the mind’s eye to be entirely separate from its Manhattan setting, to be, if you will, in Ireland for a moment. With its verdancy and loveliness, its unfolding play of rock, stone, light, green, and bright color of blooms, does this landscape feel a kinship for the homeland?