Cocoanut Grove Memorial
The Cocoanut Grove Memorial is a community-initiated project.
This project is in the fabrication phase.
Project Details
The Cocoanut Grove was a popular nightclub built in 1927 and located at 17 Piedmont Street near the Park Square theater district in Downtown Boston. On November 28, 1942, a fire occurred at the nightclub. The fire was responsible for the death of 490 people and injured hundreds more, making it the deadliest disaster in Boston's history.
The impact of the fire led to life saving medical advances in burn treatment, overhauled building codes, and improved fire safety regulations that have saved countless lives over the last 75 years.
The Cocoanut Grove Memorial Committee was established in 2015 to help Boston recognize this historic event. The committee proposed a memorial to honor the memory of the victims, survivors, first responders, and medical professionals.
In April 2021, Boston City Council awarded $250,000 in Community Preservation Act funds for the Cocoanut Grove Memorial. The City of Boston allocated an additional $450,000 toward the project as part of its FY23 capital budget.
The Site
The project site is located in Statler Park at 243 Stuart Street in the Bay Village neighborhood of Boston. It is one block from the former Cocoanut Grove site at 17 Piedmont Street. The site is adjacent to a six way intersection and several Boston neighborhoods.
Meet the Artist Team
Meet the Artist
RE:site
Artist team, Cocoanut Grove Memorial
As co-founders of RE:site, Shane and Norman explore notions of community, identity, and narrative in the context of public space. Drawing on a site’s cultural landscape, they create work that resonates with local or historical meaning, making unseen connections between themes and ideas. Their practice combines divergent aesthetic with interpretive design and fine art backgrounds. RE:site creates public art, memorials, and commemorative spaces that connect past and present by inviting the public to share in experiential moments, prompting collaborative viewership, curiosity, discovery, and dialogue.
Shane Allbritton’s personal and collaborative work is often a response to an ethos of place and memory. As a visual storyteller and mixed-media artist, she is deeply inspired by consultations with survivors, heroes, activists, and historians. Shane has dedicated nearly two decades expressing cultural stories through art and design.
Norman Lee is the son of immigrants and part of a family that has organized for civil rights and racial justice for three generations, and he sees his artwork as an expression of that legacy. Since becoming a finalist in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, Norman has developed a unique approach to commemoration, defined by a sensitivity to the transcendent and an open, inclusive vision of our society.
Shane and Norman are passionate about helping communities honor difficult histories and recover the voices of those who struggled for justice, freedom and human dignity. They often engage the community as part of the creative process through workshops, interviews, and oral histories. They take a multidisciplinary approach to site-specific projects by working with experts from various fields and using diverse materials, styles, and modalities. RE:site’s body of work includes monuments, commemoratives, suspended artwork, interactive play structures for playgrounds, light sculptures, and technology-based work.
Lydia Bean, Business Director and co-owner, stewards the organizational health of RE:site and guides our community research process. A serial entrepreneur, Lydia founded the nonprofit Faith in Texas, a social justice nonprofit that organizes people for change across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Lydia holds a Ph.D in sociology from Harvard University, and she is trained in multiple modes of research and facilitation, including ethnography, focus groups, community forums, interviews, surveys, and historical research.
Related Resources
Related Resources
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