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By Cathleen McGuigan
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Cemeteries are irresistibly spooky places. The one on Charter Street in Salem Mass., is a classic-small and moody, some of its weather-beaten headstones dating back to the 17th century. But don't expect to come upon the ghosts of witches here. The 20 people executed for witchcraft in the summer of 1692 didn't have a Christian burial; most of their bodies were pitched into an unmarked mass grave. So as part of the Tercentenary commemoration, the city of Salem decided to build a memorial to them. The competition to design it was flooded with 246 proposals, from as far away as Czechoslovakia. Earlier this month, the winning project, by architect James Cutler and artist Maggie Smith, of Bainbridge Island, Wash., was dedicated. Cutler-known for Pacific Northwest houses that are sensitive to the environment-has been designing with architect Peter Bohlin a gargantuan, multimillion-dollar residence near Seattle for Microsoft wunderkind Bill Gates. For Cutler, the Salem memorial was a modest project (the budget was just $100,000),but he and Smith made it rich in poetry and symbolism.
Tucked into a small site by the Charter Street cemetery, the memorial is really a vest-pocket park, anchored by an old maple tree and bordered by a rustic stone wall that looks like it's been there for centuries. You can see a battalion of headstones from the cemetery through a stretch of iron fence at one end. And then you notice each of the park's stone benches has an inscription carved in one corner:
REBECCA NURSE HANGED JULY 19, 1692
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reads one of them. Can you really sit, you wonder, on the names of the dead?
Every detail in this serene, slightly disquieting place carries freight. The rough wall looks timeless, its stones originally quarried in the 19th century and left in the weather. The six trees planted in the grass are black locusts-the kind, legend says, from which the victims were hanged. And the ground dips down at one end so that the grave markers of the adjacent cemetery clearly seem to be peering in. "The headstones looked like an audience," says Cutler. "We wanted to take advantage of them as silent watchmen"-the people of old Salem who stood quietly by and let their neighbors die.
There are 20 stone slabs that cantilever (or "hang," as the victims did) from the granite wall, one for each person executed. In a detail evocative of the mute power of the names carved into the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Cutler and Smith inscribed each slab. And, yes, they are meant to be benches-"It's supposed to be a contemplative place," says Cutler-but try not to sit on top of the names. "Excuse me, are you sitting on Mary Easty?" asked a passerby, looking for an ancestor hanged on Sept. 22,1692.
Just as stark and poignant are the inscriptions carved into the stone threshold to the park. They are protestations of innocence from the trials. "Oh, Lord, help me," reads one. "I am wholly innocent of such wickedness," says another. "I can deny it to my dying da . . ." begins a third quotation that disappears under the stone wall. Explains Smith: "We wanted to show that the truth was crushed."
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