Downtown Boston teemed with people this past holiday weekend. Stroller brigades patrolled the streets, the scent of sunscreen wafted through the breeze, and a general air of well-being rested like a pleasantly warm blanket over the city.
Friday, I had walked through Boston Common and seen the simple and remarkable memorial to Massachusetts’ fallen military just installed by the Massachusetts Military Heroes Fund. Yesterday I returned with my camera.
In the distance, something appears to cover the Common's usual green carpet.
Closer, the rug becomes a sea of American flags below the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. Visitors drawn to the sight stop, gaze at the flags, take photos, and chat quietly with others standing nearby. Parents keep their little kids from running into the flag field.
People and cameras are everywhere.
Flags are set between 12 and 18 inches apart, on no discernible grid.
One flag for each fallen military service person from Massachusetts.
A few signs printed on FomeCor and staked into the ground explained the memorial installation.
Deborah Howe
Taking Place 
That’s impressive! This morning, Jane (volunteer) said that a tiny boy at a memorial ceremony arrived where his mother was and gave her a great bunch of flags – which he’d plucked from the cemetery! Oh, dear – a misplaced tribute …
An amazing image – like a field of lupins on a hillside. If not exactly on a grid, the spacing looks very even – experienced flag-placers, or something people can do intuitively? Siting the “field of flags” must be an interesting challenge.
What are the flags made of? A troublesome part of me doesn’t love the visual enough to accept the waste that must be generated when the flags wear out.
The material culture of flags has evolved in an interesting way – I remember being taught in Girl Scouts all about the proper handling and eventual disposal of flags – all carefully prescribed, and anything else wasn’t “respectful.” Yet we accept the availability of mass quantities of cheap, disposable little flags, and don’t see their ultimate fate as “disrespectful” – do even the staunchest anti-flag-burning advocates see this as an issue? I suspect they don’t.
Good question. The flags are just those little cheap cloth/paper jobs. There were a couple of uniformed sailors at the edge of the field, and one was holding a flag whose stake had been broken; it looked like trash about to be thrown away. I got that same teaching about flag treatment. What has bothered me has always been the huge proliferation of wearable/usable items printed like flags — beach towels, hats, underwear, scarves, napkins — so this installation, where the flags actually served as flags, didn’t trouble me so much. But your point does make sense. I actually have more in the standby bin on this installation and memorials in general, and now you’ve added yet another angle….