Glos Memorial Park, Elmhurst

Posted on April 9, 2019 by admin

I’d like to say that I discovered Glos Memorial Park in Elmhurst on Saturday via serendipity, but I learned about the place from that exceptional travel tool, Google Maps.
The park is a strip of land, a little less than an acre, near Elmurst’s main shopping district and just east of Robert T. Palmer Dr. Mostly it’s a pleasant strolling sort of place, with sidewalks and benches and a rose garden, but there’s also a single structure.
It’s the Glos Mausoleum.
“Lucy Glos, wife of Henry L. Glos, banker and first Village President, donated the land to the City of Elmhurst,” explains the Elmhurst Park District.

“The land was donated to the City of Elmhurst in the 1940s, but was not developed into a park until 1979, with dedication in 1981. The City began leasing the property to the Park District in 1978.”

Explore Elmhurst fills in a few other details: “The Village of Elmhurst passed an ordinance in 1892 giving Village President Henry Glos permission to build a mausoleum on his property. The mausoleum was built in 1899. Henry Glos (1851-1905) and Lucy Glos (1852-1941) are buried there.”

Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington

Posted on March 27, 2019 by admin

Sometime in the late 1990s, I visited the David Davis House in Bloomington, Illinois. As Lincoln’s campaign manager in 1860 — and important in getting him nominated in the first place — Davis was a behind-the-scenes man at a critical turning point in U.S. history. Lincoln put him on the Supreme Court in ’62.

On Sunday, I took a quick look at the house. As handsome as I remember.
But that isn’t why I swung through Bloomington. I wanted to see the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery. An impressive array of stones among the still-bare trees and brown grass.

Some sizable memorials, too, befitting the prosperous place Bloomington was in the 19th century.

Not a huge amount of funerary art, but some.
I’d come to visit the Stevensons. Here’s the Adlai Stevenson famed for being shellacked by Eisenhower but also for his denunciation of Soviet behavior on the world stage.

This Adlai Stevenson was 23rd Vice President of the United States, from 1893 to 1897, during Cleveland’s second term.
Had President Cleveland’s cancer in ’93 been more aggressive, or medical science not up to its extraction — a few years earlier, probably not — this is also the Stevenson who would have been president.

I didn’t know the Scotts also memorialized on the stone: Matthew and Julia Scott. Turns out Stevenson was married to Letitia, Julia’s sister. Also, Matthew T. Scott was a business partner of Adlai Stephenson, with a distinctly 19th-century CV: land speculation, newspaper publishing, a coal mine.

Just before I left, I took a look at something a little more unusual.
According to a nearby plaque, the carving memorializes an airplane that crashed into the tree that used to stand there.

“On May 31, 1948, a group of citizens gathered at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery’s Civil War Veteran’s enclosure…” the plaque begins.

That must be here, very near the tree.

“… During the ceremony, a WWII trainer plane flown by James A. Tuley and passenger Chester H. Frahm was flying over Evergreen… to drop poppies over the grounds. The plane crashed into this tree, killing Frahm and severely injuring Tuley,” the plaque continues.

“In 2015 this tree had to come down and cemetery employees felt something more needed to be done with the wood from the tree… chainsaw artist Tim Gill was contacted and he accepted the challenge.”

The Pantagraph published a fuller version of the story.

Oak Grove Cemetery, LeRoy

Posted on March 26, 2019 by admin

One place I wanted to visit during Sunday’s micro-excursion was the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois, but just before I arrived at the town of LeRoy (see yesterday), which is about 20 miles from Bloomington, I spotted the Oak Grove Cemetery off U.S. 150.

I pulled in. Why not? I expected a small cemetery, but it stretched back for acres, with plenty of well-established trees that will probably fill out nicely beginning next month.

Oak Grove Cemetery, LaRoy Illinois There weren’t a lot a large memorials, but whoever Robert Flegel was, he and his wife Mary got an obelisk after their passing in the early 20th century.
Whatever else he did, Flegel fought to save the Union, according to the inscription: Co. K, 108th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Looks like his descendants or other family members are keen to decorate the many Flegel stones.

There are a lot of Munsters at Oak Grove as well.
Further back away from the road are older stones. Mostly 19th century, including some pioneers of McLean County, probably.
According to Find-A-Grave, spiritualist Simeon H. West was buried in the cemetery after he “departed this life Apr. 2, 1920.” I hadn’t made his acquaintance yet — that happened later in the day — and I don’t remember seeing his fairly large stone.

The San Marcos City Cemetery

Posted on February 28, 2019 by admin

San Antonio to Dallas is roughly a five-hour drive straight through, provided traffic isn’t gummed up somewhere along I-35, which it will be in Austin, so best to take Texas 130 around that city, even though it costs extra.

Also best to break the trip into smaller segments and take a look around an in-between place or two. My nephew Dees told me that Aquarena Springs, formerly a postwar tourist attraction — trap — of some renown in San Marcos, is a good thing to see. In recent years, Texas State University-San Marcos remade the place as the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment. Glass-bottom boat tours are star attraction now, rather than the “aquamaids” of yore.

Sounded like a diversion of more hours than we were willing to spare, so we skipped it this time. But we did stop in San Marcos.

First for a look at the Hays County Courthouse, which is a fine old building with a statue of John Coffee Hays outside, whom the Handbook of Texas Online calls a “Texas Ranger extraordinary.” South Texas sculptor Jason Scull did the bronze.
Not far away is the San Marcos City Cemetery. According to the Heritage Association of San Marcos, the cemetery replaced a smaller boneyard, with burials beginning in 1876. The city took ownership in the 20th century, as it retains today.

Though you climb a small hill at the entrance, most of the cemetery is level. Though not heavily wooded, the cemetery has trees to remind us that late February in central Texas is early spring.

There are some larger stones and some funerary art, but not a lot.
As Jay pointed out, ready money in 19th-century San Marcos — when such art was more likely to be erected — was in short supply, at least compared with a place like New York, home of Green-Wood and Woodlawn, or even old Charleston.

Still, there are some more ornate markers, such as the draped obelisk of Z. T. Cliett (1847-1892).
Or the stone of Dr. P. C. Woods (1820-1898).
A nearby Texas Historical Commission marker says that Dr. Woods came to Texas from Tennessee, as so many did (T for Texas, T for Tennessee). Commanding the 32nd Texas Cavalry Regiment during the war, he patrolled the border with Mexico and the Gulf coast against possible Union attack, and fought in Louisiana, where he “received an arm injury which impaired him for the rest of his life.” That didn’t keep him from being a farmer and doctor in postbellum Texas, however.

Thomas Reuben Fourqurean (1842-1925) (interesting name) had a metal marker to denote his service to the CSA, of the kind that’s easy to find in older Southern cemeteries.

Another marker — local, not state — tells the story of Ann B. Caldwell (1800-65), who was reinterred here in the 1870s from an earlier San Marcos cemetery.
In life, she had been among Stephen F. Austin’s colonists and then an early settler in Hays County.

The cemetery’s old enough to include weather-worn stones whose names have been lost to time.
Everyone’s stones will eventually disappear in the fullness of deep time, of course. These stones simply have a head start on the others.

Forest Hill Cemetery, Duluth

Posted on August 14, 2018 by admin

Late in the afternoon on the last day of July, I visited Forest Hill Cemetery in Duluth. I didn’t explore it as well as I might have. I’ve since read that there’s a “millionaire’s row” of mausoleums that I completely missed.

Ah, well. C’est la mort. Forest Hill Cemetery has a pleasant setting in the hilly land toward the northeastern edge of the city. When founded in 1890, Forest Hill wasn’t in the city, but part of the rural cemetery movement — a fairly late entry, since the movement had kicked off more than 50 years earlier.

Maybe that helps account for the relative lack of funerary art so beloved by Victorians. Or maybe the cemetery is characteristic of Minnesota reserve. Anyway, mostly it’s headstones. Parts are lightly forested.
There are slopes, which is characteristic of much of Duluth.Whoever Carl Nelson was, gone these 60-plus years, he still seems to get visitors.
Nearby, Clarence R. Nelson has a fair number of stones as well. His headstone says he was a sergeant in WWII, with the only date given being Oct. 20, 1942, presumably his death.

One of the few statues that I saw. A somber Jesus overlooks a melancholy section called Babyland.

Which includes such residents as baby Ella.
Elsewhere is a small set of columbaria, complete with a small praying hands (diminutive compared to these in Tulsa, which I saw back in ’09).
Not sure I’d want my memorial quite so close to a parking lot. Oddly, a road would be OK, at least a lightly traveled one like in a cemetery. But it’s a matter of de gustibus non est disputandum anyway.

Duluth & Environs ’18

Posted on August 5, 2018 by admin

When I was very young, I had a U.S. map puzzle that I put together who knows how many times, fascinated by the individual shapes of the states. Some states more than others, including Minnesota, with its rough northern border, more-or-less straight-back western border, concave eastern border and pointy southeast and especially northeast corners.

The northeast corner still holds some fascination, and for more than just the shape. There’s the lure of the North Woods, and Lake Superior is always calling. Enough to inspire a short trip. On July 27, after I finished my Friday work, we hit the road for a five-night trip to Duluth and environs.

Since reaching Duluth means crossing northwest all the way through Wisconsin, a few points in that state were part of the trip as well, especially Eau Claire, where we spent the first night at a spartan but tolerable chain motel.

From Saturday afternoon until the morning of Wednesday, August 1, we stayed at the non-chain Allyndale Motel, a notch up from spartan. It’s in west Duluth, almost at the edge of town, but actually Duluth isn’t that large, so the location wasn’t bad.

I guessed that the Allyndate dated from the golden age of independent motel development, namely the 1950s. The details were right, except no bottle opener attached to a surface somewhere in the room. Just before we left, in a talk with the owner, I was able to confirm that vintage. The first rooms dated from 1952, he said, with later additions.

Before checking into the motel that first day, we spent a short while in downtown Duluth, walking along E. Superior St., which features shops and entertainment venues, including a legitimate theater, art house cinema and a casino. Rain, which had been holding back on the way into town, started to come down hard, so we ducked into the Duluth Coffee Company Cafe long enough to wait it out over various beverages.

That evening, we took in a show at the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium, which is part of the University of Minnesota Duluth. The recorded show, narrated by Liam Neeson, was about black holes, and then an astrophysics grad student (I think) talked about the night sky. Many planetariums don’t bother with live narration anymore, so that was refreshing.

On Sunday we drove along much of the winding and often scenic Skyline Parkway in Duluth, stopping along the route to take in the sweeping view of the city, as well its twin city of Superior, Wis., and a large stretch of Lake Superior, from the Enger Tower in the aptly named Enger Park.

There happened to be a coffee and ice cream truck in the park, so Lilly had iced coffee and Ann had ice cream. The truck showed its regional pride in the form of a Minnesota flag.

The design needs work, like many Midwest state flags. Here’s an alternative.

Late that morning we saw Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge up close, along with other parts of Canal Park and lakeside spots. The lofty bridge — crossing the entrance to Lake Superior from St. Louis Bay — is the Eiffel Tower of Duluth, a stand-in for the city that appears in a lot of places, including a refrigerator magnet that we brought home. (But I refuse to use the i-word.)

In the afternoon, we headed northeast from town along U.S. 61, which follows the shore of Lake Superior. That region, I discovered, is known locally as the North Shore. We made it as far as Gooseberry Falls State Park.

On Monday, July 30, we headed north, mostly via U.S. 53, to Voyageurs National Park, which is hard by the Canadian border. The trip up and back from Duluth is a little far for a single day, but ultimately seemed worth the effort. Besides, something about the symmetry of visiting Voyageurs NP and Big Bend NP during the same year appealed to me.

As the girls slept late on the last day of July, I made my way to Superior, Wis., and visited the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center, a small military museum. WWII is increasingly distant, and except in Wisconsin, the memory of air ace Bong’s deeds has faded. But he had his moment.

The main event of July 31, our last day in town, was the Great Lakes Aquarium, which is in downtown Duluth, on St. Louis Bay not far from the Aerial Lift Bridge and Canal Park. The aquarium’s distinction is that it focuses on freshwater creatures.

Late that afternoon, I struck out again on my own to see one more place: Forest Hill Cemetery, which is in the hills northeast of the University of Minnesota Duluth. My kind of site, not the girls’.

On August 1, we got up early and drove home, stopping only to eat lunch in Madison. I wanted to take Lilly to Ella’s Deli, since she wasn’t with us last year when we went. But it’s closed.

Too bad. Wonder what happened to all the oddball stuff Ella’s had. Instead we found Monty’s Blue Plate Diner. Not as much whimsy on the walls as Ella’s, but the food was good.

A Day in Malacca

Posted on July 1, 2018 by admin

July 5, 1992.

Up fairly early and went to Bukit China, which sports a massive hillside cemetery populated by Malaysian Chinese. The graves have peculiar, horseshoe-shaped walls surrounding small areas dug out of the side of the hill; the gravestones themselves are in the dugout. Some look new, others neglected.

A long walk then took me to (1) the Dutch Cemetery, which contained mostly British graves and (2) the Dutch Church, which is Anglican — and there was a service going on in Cantonese, I think. I sat in a while.

Had lunch at Kim Swee Huat, not bad fried noodles, sweet and sour pork, and a great fruit lasi. On the way to lunch I saw a Chinese funeral procession pass by on the street.

[Wish I’d added a little more detail about that, but I did take a picture in which the procession is barely visible.]
[As well as some pictures of the streets of Malacca. Including an example of baking fusion of some kind.]
From lunch I went back up to Bukit St. Paul (St. Paul Hill). [Bukit St. Paul features the ruins of St. Paul’s Church, among other things. A church structure of one kind or another has been on the site since shortly after the Portuguese conquest of Malacca more than 500 years ago.]

Afterwards I visited the Muzium Budaya, the Cultural Museum. The wooden building is a marvel of its kind, and the displays interesting.

[Again with an abbreviated description. Per Wiki, “the building is a modern reconstruction of the palace of the Melaka Sultanate. It showcases the history of the region.]

Afterwards, I went back to my room to cool down, though stopping at a bookstore I discovered along the way, where I bought The Roman Games by Roland Auguet.

Around sunset, I sought out dinner, and had a remarkable one at Sri Lakshmi Vilas [even more remarkable, it may still be open], a south Indian daun pisang. That means banana leaves, the “plates” on which the food is served.

I had mutton and fish and rice and veggies on a banana leaf that I ate with my fingers, which is the way to do it. Not the best Indian food I’ve ever had, but pretty good, and certainly the most interesting presentation. Even better, it cost M$5.30, or a little more than $2.

After eating, I took a walk through old Malacca. The Kampong Kling Mosque wasn’t open to me, but light and noise were pouring from the open windows of one of the side structures, which I figured might be an attached school. Some rambunctious kids were inside.

Nearby, I saw the Sri Poyatha Moorthi temple and the Cheng Hoon Teng temple. At Cheng Hoon Teng, a large ceremony of some kind was going on, with a lot of chanting. I watched for a while. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me.

Three West Texas Cemeteries

Posted on May 8, 2018 by admin

Heading out from San Antonio on U.S. 90, I considered a stop in Uvalde, Texas, to see the Briscoe-Garner Museum. Briscoe, as in Dolph Briscoe, 41st governor of Texas (in the 1970s, so I remember him), whose family owned 560,000 acres of Texas land not long after his death in 2010. That’s about 875 square miles, or about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, and not a lot smaller than the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Garner, as in Cactus Jack Garner, 39th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and 32nd Vice President of the United States, who famously said the vice presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss.” Especially when you end up at odds with your president. So far he’s the longest-lived vice president or president in United States history, and, as some anonymous writer at Wiki points out, had the distinction of living during the presidencies of both Johnsons: Andrew and Lyndon.

Enough there for a pretty good museum, I’d say. But as I stopped at a rest area along U.S. 90, I did a little more checking and found that the museum is closed on Mondays.

So I decided to drop by Uvalde Cemetery and find Garner’s grave. It’s a large burial ground, marked by some trees and greenery, but not overly garden-like.

Still, I figured I could find Garner. There would probably be flag poles near him. So there were.

Here’s the grave of John Nance Garner and his wife Marietta Rheiner Garner. Imagine that, he was a fully grown man at the turn of the 20th century, and yet lived to see men travel into space.

How many vice presidential graves have I seen? That is, the resting places of men who were never also president? Only one other that I can think of. I got a look from some distance at the stone of John C. Calhoun in Charleston. I need to seek more of them out.

In Fort Davis, Texas, after visiting the National Historic Site of that name, I dropped by the Jeff Davis County Library to check my email, and found it to be a fine adaptive reuse of a late 19th-, early 20-century building complex that had once been a general store, post office, an early telephone exchange and other things.

Just off Texas 118 in Fort Davis is a sign that says Pioneer Cemetery. I had to take a look at that. A narrow path, completely surrounded by the kind of diamond wire-mesh fence that you might see in any suburb, led to the cemetery gate. That was the only entrance that I saw, and otherwise the cemetery grounds were surrounded by fenced-off private houses. That felt a little odd at first, but soon I got used to it.

Like the region, the cemetery is sparsely settled.

But there are a few headstones and fenced-off plots.
One old soldier that I could see, Joseph Granger, CSA.

According to the plaque at the entrance, the cemetery was active from the 1870s to 1914, which also says that immigrants named Dutchover are buried here, along with a madwoman and a couple of horse thieves. Sounds like a motley mix of pioneers, all right. Here are some Dutchovers.

Marfa, Texas, famed among the glitterati these days, still looks a lot like a small West Texas town, though with galleries, tony hotels and Manhattan-priced shops thrown in the mix. Unfortunately, after visiting the McDonald Observatory and Fort Davis, I didn’t have the time or energy to visit the sizable Chinati Foundation in Marfa, which I’m sure is a worthwhile destination.

I did look around at some other spots. The Presidio County Courthouse is handsome, for one thing.

The Hotel Paisano is decidedly handsome, too.
Before I left Marfa, I stopped at Cementerio de la Merced, a desert cemetery with a mix of wooden markers and more formal stones. Bet not many of the glitterati pause there to pay their respects.

The names on the graves are largely, but not completely, Hispanic in origin. Not far away, but separated by a fence, was a graveyard mostly of formal stones, and Anglo names.

Marfa Public Radio had this to say: “One cemetery is known as the Anglo cemetery. The other two — Cementerio de la Merced and the Marfa Catholic cemetery — are Hispanic…

” ‘Well, it was not legally segregated, but it was segregated by custom,’ says historian Lonn Taylor, a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC…

“In this part of Texas, Hispanics hold many key political offices. Yet a visible reminder of historic inequality are the cemeteries, where in death, people remain divided.”

Back to the Bronx

Posted on April 9, 2018 by admin

Early in the afternoon of Easter Saturday, I boarded a 4 train at Atlantic Ave.-Barclays Ctr. in Brooklyn and rode it all the way to the Woodlawn station in the Bronx, which is the end of the line and nearly as far as you can go in New York City in that direction. It was a local train. As far as I could tell, there were no expresses to be had on that line that day, though I might have been wrong.

It was a long ride: the better part of two hours. But it was a ride I wanted to take, watching a shifting array of passengers get on and off, and when the train got to the Bronx, watching the borough go by, since the train is elevated up that way.

Some time ago, I wrote about my passage through the South Bronx in 1983: “Before long I was on the #5 IRT, which after leaving Manhattan becomes an elevated train and gave me a full look at the wasteland that is the south Bronx. Blocks of rundown buildings are one thing, but what’s astonishing is how few buildings stand on many blocks, and how much rubble there is. I’ve never seen the aftermath of a city shelled by an enemy, but I’d think it would look like this place.”

That impression of the South Bronx never quite left me. Of course things were different this time, because of the passage of 35 years, and the fact that the 4 takes a very different course than the 5 (which, note, I called the IRT 5 in those days). The 4 train took me past block after block of large apartment buildings, as you’d expect in much of New York, as well as by Yankee Stadium. A casual look at the route of the 5 on Google shows that much redevelopment has been done in that part of the borough, which I’ve also read about.

My goal for the day wasn’t riding the train, but walking through Woodlawn Cemetery. After I first visited Green-Wood Cemetery, I became intrigued with the prospect of seeing Woodlawn, which is an equivalent historic, park-like cemetery in the Bronx, founded in 1863 and so part of the rural cemetery movement. More than 300,000 people are interred there. When Saturday turned out to be clear and almost warm, that tipped my decision toward taking the trip up to Woodlawn.

The cemetery’s web site says: “Our 400-acre cemetery has become an outdoor museum to more than 100,000 visitors who tour our grounds each year. Our celebrated lot owners comprise artists and writers, business moguls, civic leaders, entertainers, jazz musicians, suffragists, and more, including Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, Fiorello LaGuardia, Celia Cruz, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, just to name a few.

“The cemetery’s collection of monuments — including over 1300 mausoleums — were designed by American architects, landscape designers, and sculptors. The work of McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, Beatrix Farrand, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Daniel Chester French graces Woodlawn’s grounds.”

I entered at the Jerome Ave. entrance and walked across the cemetery, generally heading northeast along the main road toward the main entrance. The cemetery isn’t kidding about its many mausoleums. A lot of really large ones seem to be concentrated close to the Jerome Ave. entrance. The result of lots of wealthy people imagining they would be remembered when, of course, they are not.

Still, they’re wonderful to look at. Here’s the stately mausoleum of Julius Manger, early 20th century hotel mogul.

A Greek temple of a mausoleum for Francis Patrick Garvan, lawyer and long-time president of the Chemical Foundation.

The resting place of George Ehret, early 20th century beer baron. I was hoping it was the food faddist Arnold Ehret, but no.

Here’s more Egyptian revival. Always makes my day to run across an example of it.
Woolworth? That Woolworth? Yes, indeed. F.W. Woolworth, the king of the dime store, who died in 1919.

Among these major mausoleums, Woolworth was the only one I’d heard of before looking them up. I wasn’t out to look for famous graves, though I knew Woodlawn has plenty. I had no guide or map. I was just walking to see what I could see.

Mausoleums weren’t the entire scope of the cemetery. I saw many more modest markers, or not so modest, some very elegant.

This one was unusual: Jerome Byron Wheeler (1842-1918). Seems like he wanted to be remembered as a man of refined literary tastes. Or at least as a lover of books.

Wiki, at least, claims his mother was a second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That didn’t pay for the stone and the relief, however: Wheeler owned mines in Colorado.

One more grave of a noted person: Joseph Pulitzer and other family members, which I found by chance.

Near the main entrance, I saw this wood carving.
Glad to see that the cemetery didn’t simply rip the stump out. Like all the best rural cemeteries, Woodlawn is an arboretum too. This is a kind of memorial to the tree.

Return to Green-Wood

Posted on April 8, 2018 by admin

About three and a half years ago, I took a brisk walk through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a hilly, wooded place featuring a vast array of headstones and funerary art. The very model of a Victorian rural cemetery, you might say, except that the city has grown around it. Also, it’s still an active cemetery in the 21st century.

I wanted to go back, especially since I spent the latter part of my recent trip to New York staying with my nephew Robert and his girlfriend Meredith at their apartment in Brooklyn, which happens to be two subway stops away from the main entrance of Green-Wood. Even better, I discovered that a tour — the Twilight Tour — ran from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 30, after my work obligations were over.

So I bought a ticket online, and showed up at the main gate not long before 6. The gate itself is a striking bit of Victorian Gothic Revival. Outside the entrance:
None other than Richard Upjohn, the same architect who did Trinity Church Wall Street, designed the gate. Looks like it, too. Inside the entrance:
A resurrection-themed detail on the gate, one of four by John M. Moffitt.
Gray clouds hung over the cemetery and there was occasional drizzle. But I was dressed for it, so that didn’t interfere with the pleasure of walking through Green-Wood again, into parts I didn’t go to last time, so vast is the cemetery.

Even the bare trees and brown-green grass had their charms.

The tour wound up hills and down and around. I didn’t even bother trying to keep track of where we were. I just followed and listened to the guide, who knew a lot and pointed out things you might otherwise miss.

For instance, there aren’t that many Confederates in the cemetery, but there are a few. Such as Col. George Henry Sweet.
We soon came to the highest point in the cemetery, and in fact in Brooklyn, called Battle Hill for its part in a bloody episode in the Battle of Long Island (a.k.a. the Battle of Brooklyn) in the Revolution.

About 100 years ago, that event was memorialized on the hill by a sculpture called “Altar to Liberty: Minerva” by Frederick Ruckstull, which faces toward New York Harbor.

On a clear day, you can see the Statue of Liberty from Minerva’s perch, but we didn’t have a clear day. I understand that that particular the sightline is protected by law, like views of the capitol in Austin.

Also on Battle Hill is a sizable monument to New Yorkers who fought for the Union.

Not far away is the Van Ness-Parsons Egyptian Revival tomb. Pianist, teacher, organist and composer Albert Ross Parsons is interred there, among others.

Clearly they wanted everyone to know that the tomb doesn’t evoke pagan Egypt, but rather Christian Egypt.

Soon we came to the grave of Leonard Bernstein.
Then the more elaborate memorial to Elias Howe, improver of the sewing machine and archenemy of Issac Singer.
As promised, the tour started to become a twilight tour after sunset. The last large tomb I had light enough to shoot was a doozy, though: Charlotte Canda.
I didn’t know the story of Charlotte Canda. The guide informed us. Charlotte, daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, died on her 17th birthday in a carriage accident in 1845. Her tomb is based on unused sketches she made herself a few months earlier, for an aunt of hers who had predeceased Miss Canda.
Restoration efforts have been underway in recent years. According to the guide, back when Green-Wood was treated as a city park, Miss Canda’s tomb was an especially popular place to visit and picnic. The pathos of her story appealed to Victorians, I guess.

We carried on in the near-dark, often using smartphone flashlights, and saw the remarkable gravestone of Cortland Hempstead, chief engineer of the steamship Lexington, which burned and sank in Long Island Sound in January 1840. Of the 143 souls aboard, only four are known to have survived. Hempstead wasn’t one of them.

As seen here, the stone includes a relief based on a Nathaniel Currier lithograph originally published in the New York Sun: “Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat ‘Lexington’ in Long Island Sound on Monday Eveg Jany 13th 1840, by Which Melancholy Occurrence Over 100 Persons Perished.”

We also saw Green-Wood’s catacombs, which are usually closed to the public. They aren’t remotely as extensive as the catacombs of Rome or Paris, but they were interesting: a long concrete tunnel dug into a hill with some dozens of chambers off to the sides, and people interred in the walls of the chambers. The place was dank and smelled like a cave. According to the guide, the catacombs were a more economic alternative than burial in a plot for a while in the 19th century, but they never really caught on, probably because water always made its way in.

After leaving the catacombs, we passed by the single grave at Green-Wood that I wanted to see more than any other: Boss Tweed. Not for the aesthetics of the marker — it’s large but fairly ordinary — but for making the passing acquaintance of such an infamous scoundrel, when he’s no longer in a position to pick one’s pocket.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Cemeteries