Recently a new addition has been made to the Peace Garden. For those who don’t know the Peace Garden is outside the cafeteria. For being a fairly recent addition to the school atmosphere, there is an interesting history to this small place to hang out and think.
In 2004, a former member of the paper, Joe Hertel, got approval to hang dog tags up along the east wall of the Fine Arts building, just outside of the cafeteria, as a memorial to those who have died in the current wars at that time. The deaths amounted to a little over 4,000. To set it up, he asked some friends from the staff to help him out and naturally we helped him out as much as we could. The display, Whispers in the Wind, still stands today.
In the beginning there were competing demands from some departments to close up the memorial and from the Art Department to add to the ambiance of the Peace Garden through the addition of student and staff generated art. It also contended with dog tag thefts from the Whispers in the Wind memorial. In fact it still contends with dog tag thefts.
At first the demand to remove the memorial succeed within a few months of its initial installation and Hertel took the fight to higher powers within the school. After a few more months of fighting for the reinstatement of the Peace Garden, Salme Steinberg, former President of the University, among other administrators approved the Peace Garden becoming a permanent landmark of the main NEIU campus, even approving the Art Department to make periodic artistic additions to the Peace Garden. It was made open for donations from Art Department students and staff in Nov. 2005, a year after the dedication.
After the school allowed the Peace Garden to be reinstalled, we still had to put the dog tags back up but it was a small price to pay for paying our respects to those who have died and when that finally finished there was a re-dedication of the area that was a bit difficult to cover. This is because about half the staff at one time or another ended up working on setting up the Peace Garden. Some of us had worked on setting it up both times.
Some of the statues have been removed as of late, but with the removal of the older art came the addition of a memorial bench donated by Bohemian National Cemetery. The dedication ceremony for the bench started up on Veteran’s Day, Nov. 11, at 11 a.m.
As someone who has worked on the Peace Garden and helped out with the arranging of some of the art, it’s sad to see the art gone and to see the dog tags stolen from the memorial along the wall. However, the addition of the memorial bench is something that is a great addition. One of our current members and I have been talking about refilling the areas where the dog tags were stolen.
It is the campus way of telling both those who have served and those who have died for their country, thank you for your sacrifices. It is the campus’s way of telling people with family or friends in Iraq or Afghanistan that we will not forget.