The Beacon sits at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 116th Street in Lansingburgh, near where Vanessa and Alina Milligan were killed in 2014.
Deyva Arthur stands inside the Beacon, an ongoing art project in the Lansingburgh section of Troy.
Messages attached to the Beacon, an art project in Lansingburgh.
Ten years ago, Vanessa Milligan and her unborn daughter, Alina, were murdered in a Fifth Avenue building that the killer, Gabriel Vega, burned in an attempt to hide the crime.
Today the site is a vacant lot, adjoined by a second empty lot where the Checkerboard Laundry once sat. That's where Deyva Arthur has constructed an unusual public art project called the Beacon. Amid darkness, the message of the project is hope.
"We're a neighborhood that's sort of reeling," Arthur told me. "That's why the Beacon was important — to reclaim our community and say we're a peaceful place. That's who we are."
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The lighthouse-shaped structure, which Arthur designed and built with her husband and two children, sits on bare........