Grief given crosstown route

Bus passengers are used to being inundated with advertisements for television shows, candy bars, or research studies. But starting today, those entering MBTA bus number 252 will be confronted with a different kind of message, a stark reminder of the toll of violence in the city.

Redone to look like a yellow school bus, 252 is covered with words written by friends and relatives of children gunned down on Boston streets. They read like epitaphs: "He was a good kid." "He was Katie's first love." "She was on her way to big things." There are no names, but each quotation is accompanied by dates marking the years a victim was born and died.

Inside the bus, yellow signs memorializing more children line the walls. They read simply: Classmate, Brother, or Friend. Each of those also notes the years a young victim lived.

The bus, which will serve passengers on routes throughout the city starting today, has already had powerful effects on some, including a woman who saw it on display at City Hall Plaza yesterday and cried for several minutes. The woman, Emma Harrison , 70, said one of the messages on the bus reminded her of her grandson, Cerrone Hemingway , shot during a robbery in Dorchester in 1998.

"The sign said, 'He was smiling,"' said Harrison, who says she was devastated by the loss of the 15-year-old boy who used to call her "G. Money" instead of grandma. "He was always smiling. He always had a big grin on his face."

The bus, a public art project, was created by Thomas Starr , an associate professor of graphic design at Northeastern University, with a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The phrases on the bus are all anonymous. They were selected from questionnaires distributed by Boston's Louis D. Brown Peace Institute to friends and family members of the victims. Starr said the most poignant quotations were selected. They were also culled to exclude references to race or ethnicity in order to drive home the project's message in all of Boston's neighborhoods.

"People from the Back Bay aren't going to go to Dorchester to see memorials," Starr said, adding that solutions to crime in Boston will require backing from the whole city. "The city needs to embrace this issue as a whole or else it's not going to get done, because there's not going to be enough resources devoted to it. If the entire population [embraces] it, it's a Boston issue rather than just a Dorchester or Roxbury issue."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino , who helped dedicate the bus yesterday in a ceremony on City Hall Plaza, said he hoped the bus memorial would help people remember the dead and forge a better future for the living.

"People need to understand that there is hope," Menino said. "And that's what this is all about, it's about the future, it's about hope for each and every one of our kids in the city."

The bus, which will serve passengers on rotating routes over the next nine months, will travel throughout the city and then go to other communities on MBTA routes inside Route 128.

The colors and quotations of "Remembering Boston's Children 1980-2005" were applied to the bus with temporary appliques. Titan Worldwide, a New York company that has a 10-year contract to sell advertising space on T property, including buses, donated the space.

Starr said the project was developed over the course of several years. Initially, he had wanted the bus to be a memorial to victims killed between 1980 and 2000. But with homicide rates soaring last year, he said, he extended the scope of the project to include victims in 2005.

Community leaders said the message delivered by the bus is crucial to the city's battle against crime.

"We cannot move forward if we are not willing to look at the past and acknowledge the pain and the suffering the families in the city are dealing with," said Clementina M. Chery founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. The bus, she said, "is reminding us to remember and make long time investments in our children."

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.