Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza

For more than half a century, this circular plaza at the southern end of the promenade at 83rd Street in Riverside Park has served as a place of contemplation and remembrance for victims of Nazi brutality. One of the first Holocaust monuments in the United States, its central granite plaque and surroundings were dedicated on October 19, 1947 by Mayor William O’Dwyer before a crowd of 15,000, including 100 survivors of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Each year on April 19, people gather here in memory of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto, who rose up against their Nazi captors, and the six million other Jews martyred during World War II. Beneath the plaque are two boxes containing soil from Terezin and Sered, two concentration camps in Czechoslovakia, and a scroll in Hebrew and English, composed by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, describing the defense of the Warsaw Ghetto. In November 1940, the Nazis confined the Jews of Warsaw within an 840-acre neighborhood that held more than 400,000 Jews at its peak, sealed off by a ten foot high wall and marked by near-starvation, rampant disease, and a mortality rate of more than 6,000 per month. In the summer of 1942, 300,000 Jews were deported by train to the Treblinka concentration camp. In the spring of 1943, after learning of another impending deportation, the remaining Jews chose to fight with smuggled weapons and, organized into roughly 50 combat groups, held off the S.S. from April 19 to May 16 before the Germans regained control by burning the Ghetto to near ruin. About 15,000 of the 56,000 Jews who fought were killed, another 40,000 were deported to concentration camps, and historians estimate that 300 Nazis were killed and another 1,000 wounded. Originally intended as the cornerstone of a larger memorial that never received funding despite proposals over several decades, the plaque itself became the monument. The 12,000-square-foot plaza was part of the West Side Improvement, the Riverside Park expansion directed by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and designed by Gilmore D. Clarke and Clinton Loyd, completed in 1937 largely with federal funds. In 1990, David T. Goldstick designed and planted the perimeter gardens, and in 2001 the plaza was restored and improved through a partnership between the Riverside Park Conservancy and the City of New York, with landscape architect Gail E. Wittwer-Laird drawing on unbuilt details from the original 1930s plan to guide new bluestone curbing, lighting, benches, expanded gardens, and replacement fencing.

New York, New York · United States