Nearly 30,000 New Yorkers have died since COVID-19 touched the city a year ago.
While a rag of painters, poets and everyday citizens have honored the dead in their own way, and a small memorial is planned in the city next week, New Yorkers wonder when a transparent touchstone for the tragedy – the dead A growing monument and valor – will emerge.
In the world and the United States, monumental monuments and monuments are being proposed, planned and built. In New York, the epicenter of the plague that killed more than 500,000 Americans, vague and limited philosophies for local homage only – one on the former New Jersey dump, the other on the abandoned Hart Island in the East River – have surfaced.
As the city arrives on March 14 – the first NYC death anniversary from the coronovirus – officials have yet to call committees that will hash out ideas for a memorial, a project experts say is important to process the tragedy .
Alice Greenwald, who heads the September 11 Memorial & Museum, said, “Monuments provide the society a place where we will not forget to take the lives of the dead.” “That’s why 9/11 memorials and museums are now part of the fabric of our city.”
In Brazil, the 128-foot-tall obsolete steel sculpture was erected in Rio de Janeiro cemetery in September, burying several COVID-19 casualties. The names of 4,000 people of the deceased are to be dug in metal. By May 2020, as the epidemic still prevails, residents of Madrid can visit a black steel sculpture with an eternal flame from a government center.
In Uruguay, the architectural firm Gómez Platero proposes a striking “World Memorial to the Pandemic” designed as a reminder that “mankind is not the center of the ecosystem in which we live because we are always in the nature of Will remain subordinate. ” The massive monument has a circular platform designed to sit on the edge of the urban coastline and an opening in the middle so that visitors can see the ocean.
British artist Jeremy Deller has rendered a huge pangolin sculpture, given in gold. Anterone was once considered the source of coronovirus, and Daler has said The idea for the work was “how we think about the future and what we prioritize, rather than being as respectful as thinking about animals, to exploit, because they can … the world.” to stop.”
An initial plan was made in New York to erect a memorial on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s farm, where it was buried nearly threefold last year. The Manhattan-based architectural designer will install lights of 12 towers across the island to be illuminated in a specified time of one year, presented by John Beckman.
“There is nothing there.” “This journey is very difficult,” Beckman told The Post. “It makes sense to do a concept with light that would be visible from the city.”
Beckman said that alternatively light tributes can be placed throughout the five boroughs, with the number in each borough indicating how many people died there.
City Councilman Mark Levine has sponsored legislation to create a task force on the Hart Island Memorial and another bill that would call for a group to work to honor Memorial Front Line Workers, who died from COVID-19.
“The city has not done to COVID what it has done after other diseases, which is to tell the stories of those we have lost. It pains me when it comes to essential workers, the heroes who keep us safe. I want a memorial to honor his sacrifice and tell his stories.
The path of being able to tell those stories has proved to be a long one in the past.
It took nearly eight years until Michael Arad won a public design competition for the 9/11 memorial in early 2004 until his tribute opened on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Aradh’s concept, titled “Reflecting Absence”, was simple – two waterfall-influenced reflective pools, each 30 feet deep and one block long, to represent the Twin Towers. Chisels in the periphery of the pools will be the names of those lost. And there will be ramps descending to a magnificent gallery.
Many 9/11 families cut the underground design. Even the gamblers of the competition assumed that Arad’s work needed something to soften the starkness. He asked them to join with the famous landscape architect Peter Walker, who added a plaza lush with trees. Much later, the architects of the underground museum also toyed with Arad’s design.
Today, Arad focuses on how the city’s remarkable sense of “compassion, survival and resilience” shattered her design and propelled her through years of construction.
Arad told The Post, “I wanted to capture the enormous loss I had experienced … but the way this city came together to support each other.” “To not be able to do that now, to show our love for each other and for our city, is incredibly disputable.”
Architect Michel Joachim, who teaches at NYU and an architecture group that focuses on urban architecture and art, co-founded it, will “certainly have challenges” to create a tribute to the latest tragedy.
“Many people should be involved and many voices must be heard because it is being touched by many people. They felt that they would invest and they would need to invest to get the rights to the memorial.
By design, Greenwald believes that any coronovirus tribute should include a memorial that recognizes the selflessness of those who risk their own lives to help the rest – EMT and medicine From employees to grocery clerks and stockers, warehouse employees and delivery drivers.
“We look great like the humans we saw in 911,” he said. “There are many similarities here, there are heroes on the front lines. We need to convince them and what they represent. ”
Now the only certainty is to honor the lost people in the evening on 14 March.
Mayor de Blasio told The Post, “It is important that we have a day to move forward in the future of the city, to always remember everything that happened, to remember what we have lost And to honor them. ” “At the same time, it is a day to remember all the valor and all those who did so well to protect the people.”
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