Blogs Street Corner Renamed for Local Fallen Soldier By
Emily Brady Fri.,
Jun. 5 2009 at 4:59 PM
Last Saturday afternoon on a Jackson
Heights' street corner, Martha Clark clasped her tiny hands around a
microphone, tilted her black sunglasses towards the sky, and spoke to her son. "Jonathan," she said in
her lilting Colombian Spanish. "I know I will see you again." Clark's
son and only child, Jonathan Rivadeneira, was killed
on Sept. 14, 2007, at the age of 22, while serving as an Army medic in Iraq. He was among the 49 people the city
decided to rename a street after late last year. Only two soldiers lost in the war
were on the list; both were Latino and both were from Queens. The neighborhoods
of Jackson Heights, Corona and East Elmhurst, in particular have been hit hard.
Other mothers who have also lost sons showed up to lend Clark support at the
renaming ceremony included Maria Duran, Gladys Ciro and Maria Alcantara. After she spoke, Clark, who wore a
layered dress that looked like a seashell and her son's dog tags around her
neck, tugged on a rope to reveal a new sign at the busy intersection of 75th
Street and 37th Avenue: Corporal Jonathan Rivadeneira
Corner. Clark's apartment, where she raised her son, is just a half a block
away from her son's corner and in the days since it was renamed, she thinks of
him constantly as she walks by. "Everyone says I should feel
really proud," she said, "But I feel sad. I didn't want that name
there. I wanted him. It's a very sad corner." |