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Michael Brown Memorial To Be Replaced With Permanent Plaque

Michael Brown Memorial To Be Replaced With Permanent Plaque

By Jack Suntrup, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

FERGUSON, Mo. — The memorial to Michael Brown will be removed and replaced by a plaque on Canfield Drive and a memorial nearby, Mayor James Knowles and Mike Brown Sr. announced Wednesday.

Knowles said the Urban League will store the stuffed animals and other items that have formed the temporary memorial down the center of Canfield Drive since August ninth, when Michael Brown was shot and killed there by a Ferguson police officer.

Flanked by newly elected Ferguson City Council members Wesley Bell and Ella Jones, Knowles and Brown Sr. said the plaque will be part of a permanent memorial in the area.

In an interview after the news conference, Bell said that the new memorial along Canfield will include a statue of a dove, and that Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, had been involved with the planning of the monument.

Brown said the stuffed animals and other items along the road had become a safety hazard.

Wednesday would have been Michael Brown’s 19th birthday.

Knowles said the plaque will be placed in the street as resurfacing of Canfield begins.

He said that resurfacing is part of a larger redevelopment effort for streets near West Florissant. The mayor hopes that the state and federal government can pitch in for the “Great Streets” program, which he hopes will bring jobs, new construction and economic development to the area.

Photo: Justice For Michael Brown/Eric Garner via Facebook

Hindenburg Memorial Restored For Anniversary

Hindenburg Memorial Restored For Anniversary

By Matthew McGrath, The Record (Hackensack, NJ)

JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, NJ — On a field cut from dense pine forest, 36 people lost their lives 77 years ago in a fiery explosion as the Hindenburg airship crashed on its 63rd voyage, heralding the end of lighter-than-air commercial passenger travel.

On Tuesday, a refurbished plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the tragedy was unveiled during a ceremony honoring the lives lost in Hindenburg crash and other Army and Navy airship crashes, including one off of Barnegat Light.

The plaque lies flat, surrounded by the shape of a dirigible viewed from the top, laid out in stone in a gravel field near the massive Hangar 1, where the airship would have been stored.

Since it was initially placed on the field in 1987, the elements had worn the plate, and someone had scrawled initials onto it, said Rick Zitarosa, the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society vice president.

When the plaque was first placed on the field, there were many survivors of the flight, Zitorosa said. Now, a cabin boy and a passenger are the only living survivors.

There also is a small handful of people left who flew on the Hindenburg at other times, he said.

Dr. Horst Schirmer is one of them.

His father designed the aeronautics for the airship. He flew on the Hindenburg for a test flight when he was about 5 years old.

“I am just full of admiration and gratitude of your interest showing what happened here,” Schirmer said. “This is heartwarming to me that so much interest still exists.”

He said he grew up with the ship. And he loved the idea that lighter-than-air travel existed as a bridge between Europe and the Americas. He remembers that his flight on the massive airship was smooth and steady with no air currents that cause turbulence on airplanes.

The Hindenburg, at more than 800 feet in length the largest airship ever made, was named after German field marshal and statesman Paul Von Hindenburg. As such, it was a symbol of grandeur for a rising Nazi Germany. It had traveled across the ocean from Frankfurt am Main, Germany, when, filled with hydrogen, it erupted into flames as it approached landing in Lakehurst.

The cause of the explosion has never been firmly established. But the fiery eruption and crash was captured by photographs, newsreel film and the words of Herbert Morrison, a radio reporter of WLS in Chicago who narrated the crash.

His eyewitness account was broadcast the next day and included the now-immortal, but then anguished, cry: “Oh, the humanity!”

The intense media attention covering the crash ushered the end of airship travel as confidence in the ships fell away and airplane design improved.

Photo: Triborough via Flickr

Victims, Residents Reflect On Boston Marathon Tragedy

Victims, Residents Reflect On Boston Marathon Tragedy

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

BOSTON — One year after two pressure-cooker bombs tore through the crowd at the finish line at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others, people throughout the city are pausing to reflect on the day with tributes, prayers, speeches and music.

At a private ceremony Tuesday morning, families of the victims placed wreaths at the two bombing sites — in front of the Forum restaurant on Boston’s Boylston Street, and near Marathon Sports a block away. Police honor guards will stand sentry around the wreaths all day.

The marathon will be held this year on Monday. It is expected to be the second most crowded field ever, after the marathon’s centennial in 1996.

The city is holding a tribute Tuesday at the Hynes Convention Center close to the bombing sites, beginning at noon. Both families and public figures will attend the event, including the family of victim Lu Lingzi, who came from China to attend the ceremony. Vice President Joe Biden is also expected to speak, as is former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who announced last month that he is battling cancer.

According to an official program, the Boston Pops and the Boston Children’s Chorus will participate in the event, which will include a flag-raising ceremony and a moment of silence scheduled at the marathon finish line at 2:50 p.m., the time when the first bomb exploded.

A year after the marathon, many victims who previously had not spoken to the media have been featured in local Boston papers and TV stations. The family of Martin Richard, 8, who was killed in the bombing, appeared in a lengthy two-part Boston Globe story about recovering from the bombing. Jane Richard, Martin’s sister, who is now 8, lost a leg in the bombing.

Signs along the Boylston Street finish line area remind residents to be “Boston Strong,” but no formal memorial has been erected at the bombing sites. Still, those who were near the finish line a year ago say they think about it every day.

Gerardo DeFabritiis is a manager at the Tannery, an upscale shoe and clothing store across from the site where the first bomb went off. His daughter and son-in-law were visiting the store on marathon day last year and were about to leave when he called them back in to see a new line of T-shirts. The bomb went off soon after.

“They would have been right there,” he said, remembering, pointing to the spot where the bomb went off. He remembers walking outside after the bombing and seeing a woman on the ground, bleeding. He thinks about the bombing whenever he passes over that little piece of sidewalk.

He learned something from that day, he said: “When your time comes, your time comes.”

AFP Photo/Spencer Platt

Proposed Site Of Sandy Hook Playground Sparks Debate

Proposed Site Of Sandy Hook Playground Sparks Debate

By Jenny Wilson, The Hartford Courant

HARTFORD, Conn. — Environmentalists in West Haven, Conn., have raised objections to the proposed site for a Sandy Hook memorial playground because development of the idyllic shoreline location is restricted under a 2007 agreement.

But city officials and project leaders say they remain committed to building the playground in the city.

The Charlotte Bacon Memorial playground is one of 26 commissioned by the Sandy Ground Project, a group of firefighters, police officers, teachers and other volunteers who are building playgrounds in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey — the three states ravaged by Hurricane Sandy — in an attempt to connect two tragedies that eerily share the same name.

The parents of Charlotte Bacon, a 6-year-old killed at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in the December 2012 massacre, selected West Haven as the city for their daughter’s playground because they have a strong connection to that area, said Bill Lavin, the New Jersey firefighter who founded the playground project. Stowe’s Restaurant, a beachfront seafood shack in West Haven, was one of the last places the Bacons dined out as a family, and “we wanted it to be along that water,” Lavin said.

The site they selected lies just off the Savin Rock boardwalk, near Oak Street Beach. It is also in the middle of a segment of West Haven’s shorefront that is shielded from development under a conservation easement held by the Land Trust of West Haven. The city owns the protected land, but the agreement — the result of four decades of efforts from local conservation groups — states that the 39 acres of shoreline “will be retained forever in a natural scenic and open space condition.”

Lavin, a former union president who says he takes a far less combative approach to this debate than he did previous political disagreements, will travel to the city Monday in attempt to resolve the issue. He will visit an alternate playground site in West Haven in the afternoon and give a presentation to the City Council Monday evening, where he will look to convince officials of the merits of the project and perhaps sway them into making an exception.

“I would argue that open space is for recreation and for families and I don’t believe the playground in anyway violates that,” he said, and added that if West Haven is not the place, there are more than a dozen towns in the tri-state area who “very much would love to have this project.”

After overseeing construction of 18 playgrounds, Lavin said, he has faith in the spirit of the project and confident that the playground will be built “exactly in the place Charlotte Bacon wants it to be built.”

“In every case (with this project), it has always worked out,” Lavin said. “I’m not going to go there with an argumentative position.”

West Haven Mayor Edward O’Brien said “the Land Trust people are in favor of having the playground, they just want to seek alternate sites.”

He said the playground was “very much welcome in West Haven … overwhelmingly so.” The city has other beach areas that lie outside of the protected area, O’Brien said. “I think that in the end it will work out.”

The new spot Lavin will visit Monday is at Seabluff Beach, adjacent to Bradley Point, the southern border of the Land Trust’s protected area.

“From what the mayor and others have told me it’s an even better place,” Lavin said. “The family has given me the green light … if it feels right then we go ahead with it.”

But Lavin was clear that if the second location does not feel right, the group will not settle.

“It has to be very well used. We want it to be used by all economic groups and all races and colors and we want it to be in a spot that’s befitting this beautiful life that’s been taken,” he said.

Lavin said when he first learned of the issue last week, he suggested to his daughter, who serves as the project’s executive director, that perhaps West Haven was not the best location for the playground and they should seek a different host city. But then he remembered words from Charlotte’s mother, who described her daughter as a little girl who fought for what she believed in and refused to back down from an argument.

“We took that as a sign that maybe we just have to work a little harder,” Lavin said. “The playground’s going to be where the playground’s going to be. And the angels will help us find it.”

Photo via Flickr; Sterling College