A Woody Guthrie Memorial for Coney Island?

Woody Guthrie fans know the iconic folk singer adopted Coney Island as his home, but those who only know him as the writer of "This Land is Your Land," might not realize he made his home on Mermaid Avenue. (A fact memorialized in the Billy Bragg & Wilco "Mermaid Avenue" and "Mermaid Avenue II" CDs covering Guthrie's music released in 1995 and 2000.)

Now, Ariella Cohen reports in the Brooklyn Papers that Guthrie's family wants to create a monument to the beloved singer and songwriter--who often protested war, championed grassroots democracy, railed against an earlier incarnation of corporate capitalism and advocated for the downtrodden--in Coney Island near his former home. The family is thinking about a rock engraved with the lyrics to "This Land is Your Land" near Mermaid Avenue and West 36th Street, which is where his ashes were scattered after his death in 1967. (Guthrie lived the last ten years of his life institutionalized because of Hunington's Disease, and died at the Creedmoor mental institution.)

A Guthrie memorial or monument in Coney Island is a poignant and brilliant idea that GL hopes will be embraced.