With the holiday season in full swing, New York City sights like the Rockefeller Christmas tree and Macy’s Herald Square window displays are hot spots for tourists and local revelers alike.
Getting less notice during the holidays –and at other times of the year as well—are many war memorials. The time span from which the city’s war monuments are dedicated to includes early war memorials for the 18th century, revolutionary war, civil war, Spanish American-War, the Great War, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam war.
Karen Shelby, an assistant professor of art history at Baruch College, considers New Yorkers having a focused line of vision when it comes to war memorials.This line of vision is the daily commute from home to work, and everywhere in between. All other aspects in a commute become routine, and war memorials become part of the background. She concedes that she’s guilty of it as well.
“When reading a war memorial or a public art piece, an art historian would first think about the size of it. What is the relationship of the person in terms of scale of the object.The color of it,a dark stone or light stone, ” Shelby explained,”Whether it’s figurative or abstract, whether there’s writing on it, where the writing is located, and if it’s prominent. Is the design to overwhelm the viewer and the explanation or dates secondary.”
Shelby also commented on the powers of current events to revitalize a memorial and bring attention to events that are similar on an emotional scale. Coined by Erika Doss as memorial mania, this can sometimes reflect a general obsession with history and memory, and the desire to claim the two in a public and visible space.
New York City has a variety of war memorial monuments spread
throughout the five boroughs. There are over 270 if them in city parks alone, according to the City of New York Parks and Recreation department. These are meant to highlight focal points in community while at the same time honoring acts of sacrifice and moments of valor. While most serve to commemorate actions overseas, there are monuments dedicated to the Revolutionary War that honor events that happened in the United States.
The more renown of these monuments are the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Brooklyn War Memorial. Located in Batter Park, the Korean Memorial is one of the first in the United States to be dedicated to the war. A special committee was formed at the time to raise the money for what they considered to be the forgotten war. The monument is also known as the Universal Soldier.
Divya Dayal, a 21-year-old former Baruch College student who has lived in the city her entire life, reflects on a city war monument that she has come accustomed to seeing at Battery Park.
“There’s a series of monuments near my high school in Battery Park called the East Coast Memorial, where the names of about 5,000 WWII veterans are carved into granite slabs around a large statue of an eagle,” Dayal explains, “The eagle faces the Statue of Liberty which I always took to symbolize the sacrifice made by those who died to fight for freedom. I thought it was pretty cool.”
The Brooklyn War memorial is located in Cadman Plaza Park, and has been drawing the ire of veterans for 61 years because of the neglect that has forced it to be closed to the public. The design of the monument is a wall with over 11,000 names of Brooklynites who died in WWII. Over the granite and limestone wall stand two towering 24-foot-tall statues of a man and a woman with a child. Robert Moses brought about the plans for its construction, the parks Commissioner at the time, wanted to create a unified spread of monuments rather than the previous pattern of scattered building projects. Brooklyn was the only borough to build a monument according to Moses’ wishes.
While the winter holiday season does not draw the most attention to these monuments, Memorial Day and Veterans Day are the time when public and private acts of celebration and veneration are hosted by the city.
Public parks are the most common place to find a war memorial. Most are not funded for by the federal government but by citizen initiative. They are also commissioned through private contributions.
The age of a war monument can be told by the image that is captured. Older monuments will depict an image of victory and war, while more modern ones tend to focus on an individual who has served a noteworthy purpose in or because of war.
The oldest war monument in the city is the George Washington equestrian sculpture located at Union Square.
The architecture of the monuments varies from figural, to neo classic temple, column and arch designs. Vintage cannons can also be found in such areas as Riverside Park and Brooklyn’s John Paul Jones Park, while older cannons and mortars are exhibited at the southwest corner of the Battery and the northeast corner of Central Park.
According to the war memorials park page of the City of New York Parks and Recreation, these monuments are intended to create a “living connection”.
“Our war memorials provide places of solace and contemplation,” reads the web page, “Often crafted by leading artists of their day, they complement the mission of the parks in which they reside to sooth the psyche and feed the soul.”