On my way to work I decided to take a detour into Central Park in the Strawberry Fields part which is the most attractive one to tourists lately. Lennon’s music was a great gift not only to Americans but from an international perspective as well. At his memorial in Central Park, Strawberry Fields is named after one of his songs called ” Strawberry Fields Forever.” Strawberry Fields was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, the 45th anniversary of Lennon’s birth. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono Lennon, worked with landscape architect Bruce Kelly and Central Park Conservancy to create a meditative spot. The mosaic was created by Italian craftsmen and given as a gift by the city of Naples. Based on a Greco-Roman design, it bears the word of another of Lennon’s songs: Imagine. A designated Quiet Zone in the Park, the memorial is shaded by stately American elms and lined with benches. In the warmer months, flowers bloom all around the area. Along the path near the mosaic, you’ll find a bronze plaque that lists the 121 countries that endorse Strawberry Fields as a Garden of Peace. Personally, there isn’t too much of a quiet zone with that area now as thousands of people go about this area to take pictures and the hippies are there to promote their buttons in support of John Lennon. It is a very beautiful design when I went to see it up close and in honoring the deceased I find it very wonderful to say the least.

Bibliography

John Lennon

The Jose Artigas Staute was a surprise to me as I was on my way to a restaurant in the SOHO area in Manhattan. After further research I discovered who he was and this is what i found out.  José Artigas was born on June 19, 1764 on the outskirts of Montevideo, then part of the Banda Oriental del Uruguay, in the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Artigas’ parents were criollos, and his family were landowners; it was on their estates that at a young age he earned the respect and admiration of the gauchos for his courage and strong character. In 1797 he became military commander of the Cuerpo de Blandengues, a Spanish force charged with getting rid the country of outlaws and smugglers.

The larger-than-life statue of Artigas in Soho Square is a second cast of an original by José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín (1891-1975), which has stood in Montevideo, in front of the Uruguayan National Bank, since 1949. Zorrilla served as Director of the Uruguayan National Museum of Fine Arts, and was then considered his country’s outstanding sculptor. His father, Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, was both a poet and Uruguay’s Ambassador to Spain. This replica was fabricated by Vignali and Company, and placed on a Uruguayan granite base designed by architect Maria Cristina Caquías.

Soho Square, in which the statue stands was one of several wedge-shaped public plazas created when Sixth Avenue was extended south of Carmine Street in the 1920s.

References

“SoHo Square.” SoHo Square Highlights : NYC Parks. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016