Veterans and city officials celebrated the return Thursday of two war memorials and cut the ribbon on a new plaza housing them on the Central Hill lawn. But some feel Somerville’s remaining war monuments are being disrespected, lacking a public timeline for their permanent return from storage – now in the corner of an Inner Belt parking lot.
A city ceremony brought back the Vietnam and Korean War memorials for the first time since construction at the neighboring high school between April 2018 and March 2021.
“Today was a great day for Vietnam veterans and democracy. Veterans demanded a return of their monuments and the city responded,” said city councilor Matt McLaughlin, an Iraqi War veteran, via email.
Three more monuments – all the ones honoring veterans and their armed conflicts – will eventually be restored and reinstalled on the lawn in front of the high school, according to an early monument plan. The returned monuments will be joined by a World War I memorial now in Union Square. (Other plaques and memorials that have been or are being relocated do not honor veterans.)
The concept is to place the seven war memorials chronologically – from left to right if facing the high school – in the order the conflicts occurred, and leave space for one future war memorial. A Civil War Memorial and its Memorial Cannons represent the oldest conflict that Somerville has memorialized over the years, and the Vietnam Memorial its most recent.
Meanwhile, an unceremonious area of parking spaces marked “Reserved for GLX Contractors” has been used for at least six years to house displaced monuments. Two bronze Civil War Memorial statues representing a soldier and sailor rest on their sides in a semi-open wooden box tagged with graffiti; in another, a memorial marking military actions in the Spanish War, Philippines and China and memorial cannons sit on wood pallets with no coverings.
Veterans advocates became vocal about their displeasure in January at City Council meetings. Councilor Will Mbah held a follow-up public hearing at which veterans aired frustration about the length of the process. In a statement at the time, Thomas Gorman, then a fire captain and veteran’s commission board member, called the condition of the war memorials on Central Hill “disgraceful and an insult to our veterans that served and died for our city and country.”
The city updated the public about its memorials twice this year on a city webpage, but it has been confusing to track what monuments and artifacts are where, and when and where they are being moved.
Hearing the frustration and a fear of veteran sacrifices being forgotten, McLaughlin said, he suggested in a phone call to mayor Katjana Ballantyne that the Vietnam and Korean War monuments return first while the rest of the memorial plaza is finished. He credited the mayor, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, with their expedited return.
McLaughlin acknowledged “the yearslong delay for veterans memorials to find a new home,” though, saying the grander plans are still “years away.”
Relocation of monuments
The city stored memorials in a privately owned lot at 200 Inner Belt Road while work on Central Hill was underway, a city spokesperson said in an email. GLX Contractors, which worked on the green line trolley extension into Somerville, used the space as a construction staging area; the MBTA and property owner agreed to provide the city with temporary storage, a city spokesperson said.
There have been complaints to the city that the memorials are unsecured and in water-damaged, open-air and in many cases uncovered wooden structures. But all monuments, whether bronze, granite or other materials, were designed to be outdoors, the spokesperson said, and wood crates that seemed to “cause concern to outside observers” were used to obscure the monuments from view, not to protect them.
“Work will be starting soon” to relocate the remaining monuments, a city spokesperson said in an email. The city awarded Belko Landscaping’s bid to move them from the Inner Belt parking lot after the company completed the first phase of the Veterans Memorials on Central Hill project, a city spokesperson said.
Belko will move everything from Inner Belt Road. The 1895 building next to City Hall will take smaller items “for security,” a spokesperson said, while large items such as podia and the Civil War statues will be trucked to a fenced lot at 24 Cross St. East in East Somerville.
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