November 15, 2004

Land Matters

From December's
Landscape Architecture Magazine

Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial

Are we building memorials in places where they don't belong, to events that no longer resonate?

That question started to haunt me when I visited the Irish Hunger Memorial on a recent trip to New York City. Perched on a sloping podium planted with shaggy grasses and topped with a ruined stone cottage, it commemorates the great Irish famine of 1845-1850, which caused widespread starvation and a mass exodus from Ireland.

Aesthetically, I found the memorial a modest success. Critics such as Jane Holtz Kay ("A Hunger for Memorials," Landscape Architecture, March 2003) have noted the incongruity of its placement in the midst of gleaming office buildings. What I saw when I visited, however, is that it overlooks the riverside gardens at Battery Park City and can be viewed as an extension of those gardens. Contextually, then, I find no fault with it. My question is, rather, why would anyone want to build a monument to a calamity that occurred 150 years ago? Granted, New York City has a large Irish population, and many of that group's ancestors came over during the famine, but the event itself took place before living memory. Is there an Irishman now alive who has even spoken to anyone who experienced the famine? If not, should there then be a statute of limitations on events to be memorialized?

Nor is this a memorial landscape, like a Civil War battlefield, to an event that occurred on or near the site. The calamity it commemorates took place thousands of miles away from American soil.

Even more puzzling is the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, a park dedicated last August in Boise, Idaho. This 30,000-square-foot park on the banks of the Boise River, the subject of next month's Critic at Large, includes a life-size statue of the Holocaust victim whose diary has become world famous.

But why a statue of Anne Frank in Idaho, of all places? As with the Irish Hunger Memorial, the terrible events of which Anne Frank was a victim occurred on foreign soil. Unlike the Irish Hunger Memorial, however, the Frank statue does not reflect Idaho's demographics: The state's Jewish community of about 1,000 amounts to far less than one percent of the population. Boise only boasts one synagogue.

A major driving force behind the memorial-strange as it may sound-is to improve Idaho's image. In recent years, the state has become a haven for extremist groups such as the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. The Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial is an attempt to overcome that reputation.

In addition to the somewhat incongruous statue, however, the park features (engraved on tablets of Idaho sandstone) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and pertinent quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and other Americans. Despite questions about the relevance of Anne Frank to Idaho, it's hard to argue with a memorial whose message is human rights and tolerance. Looked at this way, this memorial is less a commemoration of anything and more a medium for the dissemination of an important message. That puts it squarely in the genre of the Bloch Cancer Survivor Parks—and, as with the Bloch parks, the question becomes: Is a park the best medium for spreading any message to a mass audience?

J. William "Bill" Thompson, FASLA Editor, Landscape Architecture magazine