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Immigration Vacation: Irish Hunger Memorial

Posted July 5, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Take a walk from the old immigration station at Castle Clinton along Battery Park City on the Hudson up to Vesey Street on Manhattan’s West Side. There you’ll find one of the oddest looking sights in the city, an upraised piece of Ireland in the heart of the Financial District. This is the Irish Hunger Memorial.

If you know what you’re looking at you’ll be moved by the scene of an Irish home, abandoned during the famine in 1847, that was moved here and set in the middle of a neglected hillside filled with Irish grasses and bushes.

But you have to know what this is all about before you go. Many people who happen upon the memorial tell me they are confused by it. So go here for the pdf brochure to find out more.

I went to the Hunger Memorial last year with my sister and her teenage daughter. We saw the quotes about the Potato Famine on the wall of the memorial. Some described the horrors faced by the starving Irish, other reflected the indifference that many of the English overlords felt towards their suffering tenants.

One enters the memorial through the ruins of the Irish home and climbs a hill that overlooks Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

My Grandpa Joe Brady told me that the famine was the worst and the best thing that happened to the Irish. It was the worst because of the hundreds of thousands of people who starved to death over six years. It was the best because it drove us to America, which he loved to call “The best poor man’s country in the world,” and allowed us to live as men and women. The community we formed here later helped Ireland free itself from bondage.

The memorial reminds us that our ancestors did not just “come to America,” they were, in fact, often driven out.

The memorial also links the famine to current crises in which war and politics, as well as ecological disaster, have left people in Africa and Asia with too little to eat.

At the end of our visit, my family located a stone brought over from County Sligo, where Grandpa Joe’s family came from. I said a prayer for old Joe and a thank you for his ancestor who decided to risk a dangerous ocean crossing on a coffin ship to give his kids and theirs’ a better chance at life.

Map of New York Irish Hunger Memorial:

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For other immigration vacation posts, click here.

Tags : culture, immigration vacation, irish immigrants

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