That was the legend, as Brent Wright understood it, when, nearly 27 years after the tragedy, Wright approached the greeting card maker to gauge the extent of that opposition.
What Wright found, instead, was quite the opposite: heartfelt cooperation from the company that, through a subsidiary, built and still owns the site where 114 people lost their lives when all that steel and concrete came tumbling down on July 17, 1981.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” said Wright, a 44-year-old attorney whose mother and stepfather died from injuries suffered at the Hyatt.
“I met a couple of times with Steve Doyal at Hallmark, and what he told me is not only do they not oppose (a memorial), but they support it.”
To the tune of $25,000, in fact, as Doyal confirmed when I called Hallmark’s chief spokesman this week.
Over the years, Doyal said, Hyatt survivors and relatives of the victims have expressed mixed feelings about the need for a memorial.
“Therefore, we indicated we didn’t think it was appropriate for us to lead the effort,” he said.
But when Wright asked how the company would view it if family members of skywalk victims pushed forward with their own memorial, Hallmark responded with a monetary pledge and an endorsement.
“We also think it should go in Washington Square Park,” Doyal told me.
That is where the Skywalk Memorial Foundation wants it, too. And that may be problematic, as I’ll get to in a moment.
But it’s important to stress the importance of Hallmark’s blessing for a memorial in the first place. The company has a great deal of influence in its hometown.
That is due to the respect that civic leaders and others have for Don Hall and his family, who were deeply affected by the disaster.
If the Halls opposed a skywalk memorial, I doubt we’d ever see one.
And that would be its own tragedy. It’s embarrassing to think that there’s not even a plaque at or near the site honoring those who died that night.
“All those lives had purpose and meaning,” said Frank Freeman, who lost his significant other in the collapse and was instrumental in forming the Skywalk Memorial Foundation.
“Personally, I felt they had been forgotten,” Freeman said. “Personally, I felt it had been pushed under the rug.”
Now it seems clear there will be a memorial to the victims and those who worked so valiantly to pull the living from the rubble.
The only questions remaining are: What will the memorial look like? And will park commissioners find room for it in Washington Square?
There’s no design yet, though there’s talk of a fountain and gardens.
As for the park, at Pershing Road and Grand Boulevard, it’s clearly the natural location.
A little more than a block from the scene of the disaster, Washington Square is an underused patch of green in the shadow of the Hyatt and the rest of Crown Center.
But as we learned this week, not everyone thinks it suitable. Parks Commissioner Aggie Stackhaus, for one, worries that a skywalk memorial would crowd out a Korean War veterans memorial also planned for the space.
That’s debatable. What’s not, she told me, is that she has a dear friend who is a skywalk survivor who’d rather not have a memorial reminding her of what she and a couple of hundred others went through that night.
“She said ‘I don’t like it, Aggie.’ ”
In other words, it’s not going to be easy. Even with Hallmark’s blessing. Even with the support of other city officials, who earmarked $75,000 for a project that will cost far more, assuming more donations come in.
But isn’t consideration also due to those who wish they had a place they could go to remember loved ones and friends who never came back from that tea dance?
Maybe in time for the next big, round-number anniversary, in 2011, they’ll get just that.
Thirty years is not too soon.
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