Relatives Of Queens COVID Victims Plan Memorial At Forest Park

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — John Walter lived in Middle Village, Queens for all 80 years of his life, but when he died of COVID in May of last year, his family wasn’t able to mourn his life in the borough he called home for eight decades.

“He loved Queens to the point where we even decided to bury him in his Met’s t-shirt, with his Met’s hat in his hand,” Brian Walter, John’s son, told Patch, adding that at the time of his father’s death Queens — initially the epicenter of the pandemic in NYC — was too hard hit by disease to safely hold a funeral.

Although Walter honored his father at the National COVID Remembrance in Washington D.C., on his drive back from the ceremony he realized the importance of having a ceremony in Queens for his father and the thousands of other people who died of COVID in the borough — and so the idea of Queens COVID Remembrance Day was born.

The Queens-based ceremony, which is being held Saturday, May 1 from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Forest Park Bandshell, is a volunteer-led effort, organized by Walter and a committee of other Queens residents, all of whom lost loved ones to COVID.

Although the day includes a series of events — including an initial ticketed dedication ceremony with 200 people and elected officials, a floral COVID memorial constructed by the Floral Heart Project, and a closing candlelight vigil, all of which will be livestreamed — Walter said that its main focus is a public memorial installation on the bandshell’s benches.

“The benches are going to be empty, and each one of them is going to be adorned with an image of an actual Queens resident lost to COVID,” explained Walter. When the committee put out an open call for Queens residents to submit names of loved ones lost to COVID in the borough, they received 270 responses, he said.

Another memorial installation, bearing hundreds of yellow hearts emblazoned with names of COVID victims from around the world, will hang inside the bandshell.

“We’re including people from around the world, but the primary focus is on Queens,” said Walter.

Throughout the process of organizing this event, Walter realized that, like himself, many other Queens residents appreciate the chance to gather with neighbors and honor the loved ones they lost close to home.

“We’re finally giving them an open space that they can come to to grieve and honor their loved ones,” he said, adding “for a lot of people it’s bringing some sense of closure to this whole pandemic.”

And though Walter suspects that his father “would have been most upset that we’re not having it at Citi Field,” he thinks he would have “liked the significance” of a memorial at Forest Park — a place that was walking distance from his home for his entire life.

You can find out more information about Queens COVID Remembrance Day here, and livestream the day's events here. There's also an explanation of how to find the public memorials, which will be up all day Saturday from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m., here.