The Irish Commemorative Stone known as the Black Rock has stood at the foot of Victoria Bridge since 1859. Thirty tons of boulder, it was pulled from the Saint-Lawrence riverbed by workers building the bridge who kept hitting bones. Beneath it: approximately 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus in 1847, fleeing the Great Hunger only to be buried anonymously in what is now the largest mass grave in Canada.
For over 160 years, the Rock has marked this tragedy from a traffic island—visible but inaccessible, honoured but forgotten. Twenty-three thousand cars pass it daily. Most drivers have no idea they're crossing a graveyard.
Now, working with the Montreal Irish Monument Foundation, Lemay is designing a commemorative park at the historic Black Rock site, the Montreal Irish Monument Park, that functions as both memorial and city gateway. Shaped by impossible questions, the project asks how 6,000 deaths can be made tangible without being morbid, how both the victims and the Montrealers who died trying to save them can be honoured, and how a site of mourning becomes a place people actually want to visit.
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