Memorial poppies art installation completed at World War I monument

Two hundred ceramic poppies now surround the World War I monument on West Main Street in Riverhead.

Riverhead High School art teachers Selena Pagliarulo and Debbie Cantalupo completed the art installation today. It will remain in place through Memorial Day.

The poppies were hand-made by high school ceramics and creative craft students taught by Pagliarulo and Cantalupo. The installation was inspired by a public art installation in London called “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” that opened in 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the World War I. That installation featured 888,246 ceramic red poppies representing the lives of British and Colonial serviceman killed in the war.

Poppies became a symbol of remembrance of World War I (July 28, 1914 – Nov. 11, 1918) because of “In Flanders Fields,” a poem written during the war by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian physician who wrote the poem in May 1915 after he conducted the funeral of a close friend killed in battle in Belgium. 

Three hundred and four Riverhead men served in the U.S. military in World War I, including nine who did not return home. The monument was erected in 1920 to honor the town residents who served and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice. It was initially erected on the northwest corner of Griffing Avenue and West Main Street, on the front lawn of the Suffolk County Historical Society. It was relocated six years later to its current site on the corner of West Main and Court streets, on a parcel donated to the historical society by Alice Perkins, where the museum was later built.

The art installation complements the new garden recently completed at the monument site by Riverhead Home Depot employees. Suffolk County Historical Society executive director Victoria Berger celebrated her birthday this year by raising $1,000 for the garden on social media after recent road work by state highway crews disrupted the planted area near the monument. The Home Depot manager saw Berger’s fundraising effort and reached out to offer flowering plants and labor. A crew of about 10 volunteers showed up and dug out a lot of old plants that had died after the road work, Berger said today.