CARL GLASSMAN/TRIBECA TRIB

Staining of the memorial is caused by leaks that the Authority hopes to fix.

Battery Park City’s Irish Hunger Memorial is badly leaking. Just 10 years after it was built, the quarter-acre plot covered in rocks, grass and bushes from Ireland will get a major overhaul.

On the structure’s south side, brown sludge oozes through a crack, staining the memorial wall’s bands of ancient Kilkenny limestone. Water drips from the curved concrete overhang that surrounds its base.

“It’s an issue,” Gwen Dawson, the Authority’s head of asset management, told the Trib. “Over time it could become a more serious issue, so we want to get out in front of it.”

The Authority’s preliminary plan is to remove about 40 percent of the memorial’s landscaping in order to cover the concrete beneath with a waterproof resin membrane system, said Kenneth Wind­man, a project manager with the Authority. That plan may change after the Authority hires a construction manager and a design team to assess the memorial’s condition, he said.

“We don't know yet how significant an endeavor this is going to be,” Dawson said.

The Authority did not have a cost estimate on the repairs.

CARL GLASSMAN/TRIBECA TRIB

The memorial, which along with its stone cottage contains rocks from all of Ireland’s 32 counties as well as native Irish flora, commemorates the Great Potato Famine of 1845 to 1852. It is estimated that one million people died from famine and disease.

This is not the first time the $5-million memorial, at Vesey Street and North End Avenue, has needed to be fixed. Less than a year after it opened, the Authority closed the structure to stop water from pouring off the sides and to repair the walkway. The bill for those repairs was $250,000, according to the New York Times.

Dawson, who began working at the Authority after the memorial was built, called the memorial “kind of a strange animal” that defies the usual expectations of durability.

“It’s a structure, it’s kind of a landscape element, it’s an art piece,” Dawson said. “I don’t know that anyone would have a frame of reference to say, ‘Yes, we expect this to last x number of years before we wind up having to do any sort of significant maintenance on it.’”

Artist Brian Tolle, who designed the memorial, declined to comment on the upcoming repairs.

The cracks, visible beneath the concrete on three sides of the memorial, be­gan appearing years ago. But, Windman said, concrete is expected to crack and a recent inspection showed that the structure is safe. What makes the cracks troublesome at the memorial is the water dripping through them.

Signs of wear can be seen along other portions of the memorial. The grey stone wall at the entrance to the memorial is missing grout, and the stone is chipped, showing a gap where the two edges of the wall meet.

The Authority aims to begin work on the memorial in the fall of 2013, finishing it the following spring. The Bat­tery Park City Parks Conservancy will work with the construc­tion team to document the placement of each stone and to remove and save the landscaping, Wind­man said.

“A lot of this stuff when it was built came either from Ireland or from Irish stock seed that was grown here, so we are going to try to save as much as we can,” he said.

Windman said he did not know how much of the memorial’s stone wall perimeter will have to be removed, but that the stone cottage near the base of the memorial will not disturbed when much of the landscaping is removed.