A naturally beautiful oasis that replenishes the body, mind and spirit.
A place to remember, to honor and to inspire.
NYC AIDS Memorial honors the lives of New Yorkers who died from AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). The Memorial also recognizes caregivers, activists, and people living with HIV who helped mobilize support to provide care, fight discrimination, change policy, and advance research.
World War I
In the aftermath of World War I, memorial parks became increasingly popular. The conflict, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, involved most of the nations of Europe and touched other parts of the world, including the United States. It was unprecedented in the scale of slaughter and destruction it caused. It also encouraged new forms of memorialization, with lists of names, Tombs of the Unknown containing a single unidentified body, and empty cenotaph monuments honoring the many servicemen who were killed and never identified.
Unlike the competing headstones of traditional cemeteries, memorial parks use flat plaques or markers that are buried in landscaped plots to mark graves. This allows the burial grounds to develop park-like, rolling lawns in which landscape features—such as water, statuary or gathering spots—delineate rows of graves and larger sections of the memorial.
At its dedication in 1931, President Herbert Hoover greeted thousands of World War I veterans and Gold Star Mothers at the Liberty Memorial. Other dignitaries included General John J. Pershing and the famed band leader and American Civil War composer, John Philip Sousa.
The Liberty Memorial, designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm famous for Central Park in New York City, honors the 2.7 million American soldiers who died in the war. It is considered one of the first and most influential of the modern memorial parks.
It is also a sculptural work that reflects the changing perception of what it means to be an American soldier during the World War I era. The memorial’s main sculpture is called A Soldier’s Journey and depicts the experience of an American soldier from the time he leaves his family to go off to war to when he returns home again. The sculpture shows him taking leave of his family, charging into battle, seeing men around him killed and wounded and being shell-shocked.
A Soldier’s Journey was created by the sculptor Sabin Howard and is mounted on the western end of the Memorial Core. It is made up of thirty-eight separate figures that are placed along the 58 feet of wall towards which the Memorial Core is facing. Each figure represents an aspect of a soldier’s life, starting with him leaving his family to go off to war, then showing him being wounded and gassed and finally returning home again to his wife and children.
In 2015, the governing bodies of Memorial Groves chose to convert the existing park into an entirely different design. The conversion only slightly alters the physical spaces, but completely reverses its use. The result is a set of isolated tweaks that looks nothing like the original visions of what the park could be. Framing the impact of this change in terms of historic preservation forced officials to balance only important physical landscapes with war commemoration, squeezing any consideration of creating a useful, lively public space. This shambolic process illustrates how, when it comes to designing effective urban spaces, process is no substitute for the right goals.