Five years later, NYC nowhere close to building COVID memorial: ‘It’s disgusting’

New York City was the world’s epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, but five years and 46,000 deaths later a memorial to the victims and their caregivers is nowhere close to being realized.

A City Council bill to study building a memorial on Hart Island — the Potter’s Field where thousands were buried during the peak of the pandemic – remains stalled a year after being introduced, and state legislation to fund memorials going up throughout the Empire State sits dormant in Senate and Assembly committees.

“We passed the five-year mark [last week], and to still have nothing, and to learn of this [Council] bill that has been sitting there for a year with still no movement, it really is a testament to the way that the city feels about COVID,” said Jessica Alejandro, 27, who lost her grandfather Joseph Anthony Szalkiewicz to complications from the bug in March 2021.

“Quite honestly, it is so disgusting and disheartening,” she added. “I think it’s really long overdue that New York City step up the way that other cities and states across the country have.”

Both she and her sister, Danielle Alejandro, 25, spearheaded a “Yellow Heart Memorial” held in 2022 at Queens College where 123 yellow paper hearts were displayed to honor members of the college’s community lost during the pandemic.

The only other Gotham tributes include the city’s Sanitation Department unveiling a Lower Manhattan sculpture in May 2021 titled “Forever Strongest” to honor agency workers who died from the virus, and a “COVID-19 Day of Remembrance” memorial in March 2021 during which photos of victims were projected onto the Brooklyn Bridge for a night.

Dozens of grieving New York families also gathered in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, last week in front of a makeshift memorial wall featuring photos of nursing home residents who died during the pandemic. They and eight NYC mayoral candidates marked the five-year anniversary of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial order to house COVID patients in nursing homes by demanding he take responsibility.

Cuomo, who has denied such a link between his order and elderly deaths, proposed in 2021 having the state build a “Circle of Heroes Monument” with maple trees and an “eternal flame” at Rockefeller Park in Lower Manhattan to honor medics and other frontline workers who kept the city operating during the pandemic’s early months.

But that plan was paused indefinitely after Battery Park City residents balked, in part because the neighborhood was already flooded with other memorials such as the Holocaust Museum and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who has led the charge for building a memorial on Hart Island since August 2020, had the City Council sponsor legislation on multiple occasions to create a “COVID-19 Memorial Task Force” to study the project.

The most recent bill, introduced in March 2024 by Carmen De La Rosa (D-Manhattan), has yet to move out of the Council’s parks committee.

Levine said he’s not giving up – but is open to other sites besides Hart Island.

“It is important to remember and memorialize the profound loss and immense sacrifice endured by New Yorkers,” said the lefty Manhattan Dem, who is running for city comptroller.

The Parks Department, which oversees Hart Island, said De La Rosa’s bill is under review.

John Beckmann, a Manhattan-based architect who floated a 2021 proposal for a COVID-19 memorial that featured installing 12 towers of light throughout Hart Island to be illuminated at a designated time of year, said it’s “unfortunate” the bill is languishing.

“It’s taken a lot of time for people to recover psychologically from what we’ve all been through, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s taking people time to unwind,” he said. “But now is as good a time as any.”    

But some blasted Hart Island, which is only accessible via ferry, as a wholly inappropriate site.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to turn those sacred gravesites into a tourist attraction,” said Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens). She said a memorial would work better in a public park. 

The Alejandro sisters in 2022 sent a letter to Mayor Eric Adams imploring him to have the city commission a permanent monument or other type of memorial commemorating the lives lost during the pandemic — only to be told it’s “premature.”

The rejection led the sisters to seek out state Sen. Jamaal Bailey (D-Bronx/Westchester), who sponsored a bill to create a permanent funding source to build memorials honoring pandemic heroes and victims statewide that remains stalled.

Bailey did not return messages, but state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), a bill co-sponsor and a NYC mayoral candidate, said a permanent NYC memorial is needed.

“Her district was the national epicenter, so there certainly is an argument for it to be in Elmhurst,” said Ramos spokesperson Astrid Aune. “But the dominant goal is for us to actually engage in a collective grieving process that never really happened.”

Other cities around the globe have succeeded in memorializing the 7.1 million people who died worldwide.

In London, artists and other volunteers created “the National COVID Memorial Wall,” a mural of 150,000 pink and red hearts dedicated to victims who died from the virus. 

Similar memorials are up in Belgium, Brazil and elsewhere, while an illuminated, 25-foot stainless steel “global” monument is expected to be completed in Chicago later this year.