Memorial for pedestrians killed by cars
Posted January 10th, 2007 by eliot
Right: A memorial for Peter Hornbeck, a friend of a friend. Pete was killed January 10, 2004, when a driver going close to 100 miles an hour ran him down in the intersection of Park Ave. & 96th St. The driver abandoned the car and fled the city. He was later caught and sentenced to several years in prison.
I didn’t know Pete but I know a friend of his. We worked together on this memorial and installed it during yesterday’s second annual memorial bike ride for cyclists and pedestrians killed in New York.
After 19 months of installing ghost bikes for slain cyclists around New York, this is the first memorial we’ve created for a pedestrian. In 2006, 135 pedestrians and at least 14 cyclists were killed by motor vehicles in the five boroughs.
We tried to come up a simple visual icon (like the white bikes), but couldn’t come up with any one symbol that seemed appropriate. In Bogota, Colombia, a simple black star is stenciled onto the sidewalk, but that didn’t seem right. The traditional “chalk outline” seemed too gruesome. Suggestions are welcome. Email us at visual.resistance@gmail.com.
