Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial replicates a quarter-acre of Irish countryside, raised on a piece of limestone to a height of 25 feet above street level. The carefully designed landscape contains Irish plants and stones from every Irish county, as well as a stone cottage that was built in the 1820s and relocated from Ireland to this memorial. Glass panels and stones throughout the memorial have lines of poetry and songs and statistics about hunger worldwide. Tolle collaborated with Gail Wittwer-Laird and 1100 Architects on this project, which opened in 2002. Unfortunately, the climate of Ireland is very different from that of New York City, and the memorial needed extensive repairs in the spring of 2003 in order to fix leaks, drainage issues, erosion, and walkways that became dangerously slippery in the rain.
