Crash Memorial Taken to Heart

Tony Moreno tends memories.

For the last two weeks, since George Russell Weller’s maroon Buick charged through the crowded Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, killing 10 people and wounding scores of others, Moreno has cared for the spontaneous memorial at the crash site.

“I put things in order,” Moreno said early Tuesday, as he righted a ceramic angel and propped up a sagging cardboard placard with photographs of the victims.

Moreno’s regular job is to do the city’s dirty work unnoticed, emptying garbage bins and sweeping sidewalks under cover of darkness. From 3 a.m. to 2 p.m., wearing an orange T-shirt, yellow pants and blue rubber gloves, he motors around the Third Street Promenade in his white maintenance vehicle.

But Moreno -- who goes by the nickname “Chip” because of a former colleague named Dale -- is also responsible for the delicate task of clearing out dead flowers, sodden cards or tattered offerings without calling attention to the fact that the memorial is slowly shrinking.

“Well, we’ve got to do our job,” he said. “And the thing about it is that a lot of the flowers are getting old, and they’re starting to smell.”

Survivors, people related to the victims, and passersby began leaving items at the base of the bronze dolphin statue that leaps from the Promenade pavement toward Arizona Avenue as early as the night of the crash.

By last Wednesday, a week later, the memorial reached from the wall of the kiosk behind the dolphin to the steel traffic pillars along Arizona. A 4-foot stuffed pink flamingo, affixed with clear plastic packing tape, rode high on the back of the dolphin, and potted daisies, cellophane-wrapped bouquets and tall votive candles competed for space around the dolphin.

That afternoon, Eddie Greenberg, who heads the Promenade maintenance crew, asked Moreno to start removing flowers that had wilted in the heat. The next morning Moreno removed three bags’ worth of spoiled flowers.

“We’re trying to attend to people’s sensitivity, because it’s a real outpouring of mourning,” Greenberg said. “We’ll tend it as long as people put items out.”

Sunday, after visitors to Saturday’s farmers market had replenished the collection, Moreno took away another bag and a half of offerings.

“I leave the flowers if they still have color to them,” he said. “The stuffed animals, they stay, and I leave the glass votives if they still have candles inside or if they have pictures on them, for religious reasons.”

Moreno said he didn’t want the Promenade memorial to be treated like a cemetery, or like some public memorials, where all offerings are collected daily or weekly.

“Imagine if you left something one afternoon, and the next day it wasn’t there,” Moreno said.

Santa Monica’s approach to maintaining the memorial echoes the tack taken by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We had lots of spontaneous memorials show up in parks around the city,” said Liam Kavanagh, the department’s deputy commissioner of operations. “But we reached a point where the volume of materials created a problem for normal use of the park.”

A heavy rainstorm a week after the attacks in New York damaged flowers and paper tributes people had left at the various memorials, and city crews working early in the morning -- but after dawn, Kavanagh said -- began the process of dismantling them. Flowers and unsalvageable materials were thrown out, but personal items were held for collection at city facilities.

Unclaimed tributes were eventually donated to municipal museums and to the Smithsonian in Washington, which also collects memorial items from the Vietnam War Memorial and other public monuments throughout the country.

Kathleen Rawson, executive director of Bayside Corp., which manages the Promenade for the city of Santa Monica, said that stuffed animals would eventually be given to homeless shelters and that personal notes would be saved for the victims’ families.

But the memorial would stand, she said, until no new items were being added.

By 4:15 a.m. Tuesday, as Moreno made his rounds, the Santa Monica memorial had been reduced to a cluster of bouquets carefully arranged around the dolphin, with a row of tall glass votive candles lined up in front of the flowers. Two of the bouquets were adorned with figurines of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Moreno checked the potted plants, which he waters regularly, and fussed with the candles. “See this?” he said, holding out one votive adorned with a picture of the Virgin Mary. “It can still be burned, so I’ll leave it. If I had matches I’d light it, but I don’t.”

As Moreno walked around the site making small adjustments, a blond woman walked up carrying a black poster-board adorned with a photograph and inscribed with a message to Gloria Gonzalez, one of the victims: “Gloria we love you -- your friends forever.”

She contemplated the memorial for a few minutes before settling her addition in among some tall lavender shoots.

“Maybe by Friday it will be a little bit smaller,” Moreno said before he drove away to continue his rounds. “But it’s nice. It brings some color to the Promenade, you know?”