The Whole Death Catalog
Page 22
To raise money for the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.—the city’s oldest graveyard, containing monuments designed by Benjamin Henry LaTrobe, architect of the Capitol Building—officials have sponsored a John Philip Sousa concert performed by a seventy-piece marching band and a dog parade featuring costumed canines decked out as historical figures. Other cemeteries in need have resorted to everything from jazz performances in the memorial chapel to elaborate brunches prepared by star chefs and served in the crematorium.
Not all of these special events are thrown for preservation purposes. Some are designed to attract potential customers. That explains the Renaissance fair with strolling troubadours and jousting knights held at the Oak-wood Cemetery in Troy, New York, an 1848 graveyard that still has enough burial space for the next two hundred years. “We want visitors to think, ‘Wow, I’d like to spend eternity here,’” one cemetery trustee explained to the Times. “It’s our way of saying, ‘We’d love you to stay with us permanently’”
Ten Cemeteries to
See Before You Die
1. PÈRE-LACHAISE, Paris
One of the wonders of the necropolitan world, this wildly picturesque, world-famous graveyard is a must-see tourist destination for any art lover, cultural connoisseur, aficionado of mortuary architecture, or fan of the Gothic sublime. A true city of the dead, consisting of 118 suffocatingly overcrowded acres, Père-Lachaise can be navigated only with the aid of a guidebook, a map, or one of the knowledgeable locals who hang around the entrance and are always available for tours. Among the countless luminaries interred on the grounds are Frédéric Chopin, Isadora Duncan, Eugène Delacroix, Yves Montand, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and (of course) that icon of sixties rock decadence, Jim Morrison.
Whether you’re paying homage to your favorite artist, marveling at the astonishing works of funerary sculpture, or simply strolling nervously past the ineffably creepy tumbledown mausoleums whose unhinged doors and shattered stone floors suggest that their occupants have recently escaped from the grave, you’re guaranteed to have a memorable time at this legendary necropolis.
VIRTUAL
PÈRE-LACHAISE
Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can now visit the world-famous Père-Lachaise Cemetery without having to subject yourself to the hideous ordeal of a Paris vacation. A beautifully designed website allows you to stroll through the sylvan avenues of the necropolis and marvel at the spectacular gravesites of dozens of its most illustrious residents, from Balzac and Chopin to Edith Piaf and Marcel Proust. (American interloper Jim Morrison is there, too.) Just go to http://dying.about.com/od/Fascinationwithdeath/Fascination_with_Death.htm and follow the link to the virtual tour.
ADDRESS: 16 rue du Repos, 20th
arrondisement, 75020 Paris (entrances on
rue des Rondeaux, bd. de Ménilmontant,
and rue de la Réunion)
METRO: Gambetta, Philippe-Auguste, or
Père-Lachaise
HOURS: Mon.-Fri. 8 A.M.-6 P.M., Sat.
8:30 A.M.-6 P.M., Sun. 9 A.M.-6 P.M. (5:30 P.M.
in winter)
TEL.: (33) 1 55 25 82 10
2. THE CATACOMBS, Paris
Though not, strictly speaking, a cemetery, the Catacombs of Paris should definitely be part of any sightseeing tour of great international funerary sites—unless you happen to be even slightly claustrophobic or squeamish about spending time in the company of several million exhumed human bones. Located deep beneath the city streets, this former gypsum quarry was consecrated as a burial place in 1786, at which time the bones from the notorious Cimetière des Innocents were dug up and transferred to its underground grottoes. “Other overcrowded churchyards soon followed suit,” Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall inform us in Permanent Parisians. “At dusk the bones were loaded into carts, which were followed by priests chanting the burial service. No attempt was made to individualize the remains.”
To reach the Catacombs, you are required to undergo a subterranean journey not unlike the one experienced by poor For-tunato in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” After descending a seemingly endless flight of narrow stone stairs and proceeding along a dank, dark, oppressively cramped passageway, you will finally arrive at the ossuary entrance, whose lintel is carved with the heartwarming greeting “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort” (“Stop! This is the kingdom of the dead”). If you choose to ignore this warning by crossing the threshold, you will find yourself wandering past a series of large recesses in the stone walls. Each is fronted by a retaining wall of skulls and tibias (some quite artfully arranged) behind which looms an enormous pile of indiscriminately commingled bones. The remains of many illustrious Parisians are here, though you won’t be able to pick them out of the jumble. When you finally reemerge into the world of the living, you will never have felt so grateful to see the sky.
Note: If it crosses your mind to abscond with a macabre souvenir, you should strongly resist the temptation, not only because of the inherent sacrilege of the act—which is tantamount to grave robbing—but because you will be searched as you depart.
ADDRESS: 1 place Denfert-Rochereau,
14th arrondissement, 75014 Paris
METRO: Denfert-Rochereau
HOURS: Tue.-Fri. 2–4 P.M.; Sat.–Sun.
9–11 A.M., 2–4 P.M.
TEL.: (33) 1 43 22 47 63
3. HIGHGATE, London
One of the best-known garden cemeteries of the Victorian era, Highgate is renowned for its elaborate funerary architecture and impressive landscaping. Its original section—now known as the West Cemetery—was designed by architect Stephen Geary, who supplied it with a handsomely terraced layout, gently winding paths, and imposing features. Most notable are the famed Egyptian Avenue—entered through a massive archway flanked by lotus-decorated columns—and the Circle of Lebanon, a somber structure of twenty sunken tombs surrounding a vast cedar tree. During its early years, when the cemetery was filled with plantings from an on-site greenhouse that employed more than two dozen full-time gardeners, Highgate became the burial place of choice for fashionable Londoners. By 1854, fifteen years after its opening, its success led to the creation of a second section across the road, the so-called East Cemetery, whose most famous permanent occupant is Karl Marx. Eventually, the original West Cemetery suffered a severe decline. The tombs and mausoleums fell into disrepair (when they weren’t actively vandalized) and the once carefully tended grounds became choked with trees and undergrowth. In 1975, West Highgate was closed to the public. It has since enjoyed an extensive and ongoing restoration and its beautiful stone monuments and notable graves are once again available for viewing, albeit on a restricted, guided-tour-only basis.
ADDRESS: Swain’s Lane, Highgate, London
N6 6PJ
HOURS: The cemetery is open every day except December 25 and 26. The cemetery is closed temporarily when there is a funeral in progress. East Cemetery: Open from 10 A.M. weekdays, 11 A.M. weekends. Closing time: Apr. 1–Oct. 31: 5 P.M. (last admission 4:30 P.M.), Nov. 1-Mar. 31: 4 P.M. (last admission 3:30 P.M.). West Cemetery: Admission to the West Cemetery is by guided tour only. Weekday tours: There is one tour at 2 P.M. (guaranteed for 12–15 people). It is advisable to book in advance by telephone, and visitors are requested to arrive at 1:45 P.M. There are no weekday tours in December, January, and February. Weekend tours (for which there is no booking) take place each hour at 11 A.M., 12 noon, 1 P.M., 2 P.M., 3 P.M., and 4 P.M. (last tour at 3 P.M. from November 1 to March 31), again guaranteed only for 12–15 people each. It is advisable, especially in holiday seasons, to come at least half an hour before the scheduled time.
TEL.: (44) 020 8340 1834
4. PROTESTANT CEMETERY, Rome
The name by which this tiny plot of land is commonly known—the Protestant Cemetery—is somewhat of a misnomer since Jews and other non-Christians are also buried on the site. Its Italian name, Cimitero acattolico (non-Catholic cemetery) is a more accurate designation. By wh
atever name it’s called, however, this urban oasis—with its towering cypress trees and proximity to the ancient Pyramid of Cestius (an Egyptian-style tomb built around 12 B.C.)—is widely regarded as one of the world’s most glorious graveyards. Henry James deemed it “the most beautiful thing in Italy,” while poet Percy Bysshe Shelley couldn’t think of a better spot to spend eternity. “It might make one in love with death,” he declared, “to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
Shelley, who drowned in a boating accident not long after making this comment, would get his wish. His cremains (minus the heart, which was snatched from the flames by his friend Edward John Trelawney) are interred on the grounds, beneath a stone with an inscription from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of Him that Doth Fade / But Doth Suffer a Sea Change / Into Something Rich and Strange.” Not far away lie the remains of Shelley’s fellow immortal, John Keats, whose tombstone features a famous (if overly pessimistic) inscription by his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Brown: “This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in water.”
Indeed, given the smallness of the cemetery—which was founded in 1734 and is said to be the oldest burial ground in continuous use in Europe—it may well contain, as writer Elizabeth Rosenthal claims, “the highest density of famous and important bones anywhere in the world.” Other renowned occupants include Goethe’s only son, August; nineteenth-century American novelist Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast; Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, a founding father of European Communism; English poet and critic John Addington Symonds; Josef Myslivecek, the eighteenth-century Czech composer credited with inventing the string quartet; and the American Beat poet Gregory Corso. Among the graveyard’s many beautiful works of funerary art is the sculpture Angel of Grief, an enormous weeping angel that adorns the tomb of its creator, American artist W. W. Story, and his wife, Emelyn, for whom it was designed.
Unfortunately, despite its historic significance, the Protestant Cemetery has never received landmark status from the Italian government and the public financing that goes along with it. As a result, it has fallen into such extreme disrepair that it has been placed on the World Monument Fund’s watch list of the one hundred most endangered sites on earth. At present, it is managed by a committee of volunteer conservators whose hope (as Rosenthal writes) is that the World Monument Fund listing “will bring in financing, so that they will be able to restore the cemetery to its former glory and preserve the important monuments within.”
ADDRESS: Via Caio Cestio 6, Rome
DIRECTIONS: Take the metro to the Porta San Paolo stop (Piramide), cross the square to the Via Caio Cesto, and follow the wall to the entrance.
HOURS: 8–11:30 A.M., 2:30–4:30 P.M.; closed on Wednesdays
TEL.: 06 5741900
Mount Auburn Cemetery. Nineteenth-century engraving.
5. MOUNT AUBURN,
Cambridge., Massachusetts
America’s first garden cemetery, Mount Auburn consists of 174 picturesque acres (most of which, despite its official Cambridge address, actually lie in adjacent Watertown). Nestled in a bend of the Charles River, its lush, wooded landscape—featuring over fifty-three thousand trees—has served as a quasi-rural retreat for nature-hungry city dwellers since the cemetery opened in 1831. Mount Auburn still draws more than two hundred thousand visitors a year and is regarded as a mecca for birders, who flock there to catch glimpses of dozens of species, including white-throated sparrows in the fall, yellow-rumped warblers in the spring, and northern waterthrushes and great crested flycatchers in the summer.
To the true taphophile, of course, the real attraction is the cemetery’s magnificent collection of historic tombs and memorials. Among the luminaries buried there are Louis Agassiz, Robert Creeley, Mary Baker Eddy, Felix Frankfurter, Buckminster Fuller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Winslow Homer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Bernard Malamud, and B. F. Skinner.
ADDRESS: 580 Mount Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
HOURS: Oct.-Apr., 8 A.M.-5 P.M.;
May-Aug., 8 A.M.-7 P.M.
TEL.: 617-547-7105
6. GREEN-WOOD, Brooklyn, New York
Four times the size of Père-Lachaise, this sprawling 474-acre rural cemetery was founded in 1838 and quickly became one of the nation’s leading tourist attractions, drawing upward of a half million visitors a year in its heyday. With its rolling hills, winding paths, charming ponds, and magnificent mortuary sculptures, it was precisely the sort of lush arboretum-cum-memorial garden that appealed so intensely to Victorian sensibilities.
Though the crowds are considerably smaller today, Green-Wood (designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006) remains a delightful spot for a Sunday outing and a taphophile’s paradise. As the preferred interment spot for eminent nineteenth-century New Yorkers, it boasts a veritable who’s who of famous Victorian occupants, including Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, Samuel B. Morse, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. There are also plenty of later notables, ranging from world-famous artists such as Leonard Bernstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat to legendary gangsters such as Albert Anastasia and Johnny Torrio. Altogether, roughly six hundred thousand individuals are interred on the grounds and it continues to average nine burials and/or cremations per day. Its many sculptural highlights include a life-size statue of the goddess Minerva saluting the Statue of Liberty; the exquisite Griffith monument, featuring a bas-relief of a nineteenth-century housewife waving farewell to her husband as he hurries to catch a trolley car for work; and the imposing tomb of tobacconist John Anderson in the shape of a Greek Revival temple.
ADDRESS: 500 25th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11232-1755
SUBWAY: Take the R train to 25th Street
in Brooklyn, then walk up the hill one
block to the main entrance at 5th Avenue
and 25th Street.
HOURS: 7:45 A.M.–5 P.M. daily
TEL.: 718-768-7300
7. WOODLAWN, Bronx, New York
Founded in 1863 when the Bronx was still farmland, Woodlawn Cemetery became the favored burial place for the fantastically wealthy robber barons of the Gilded Age—a necropolis with such a rich concentration of elaborate tombs that it has been likened to the Valley of the Kings in ancient Thebes. In a beautiful parklike setting filled with magnificent trees—white oak and weeping beech, umbrella pine and cork, goldenrain and silver bell—visitors can view some of the most spectacular mausoleums ever erected on American soil, many designed by the most famous U.S. architects of the day, including John Russell Pope, Raymond Hood, James Renwick, James Gamble Rogers, and Stanford White (the architects, respectively, of the Jefferson Memorial, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Yale University, and the Washington Square Arch). The long-dead nabobs who occupy these ornate tombs—which resemble everything from Greek and Egyptian temples to the chapels of Renaissance chateaux—include R. H. Macy F. W. Woolworth, J. C. Penney Jay Gould, H. O. Armour, and Henry Westinghouse.
Besides its dense population of plutocrats, Woodlawn also boasts a long list of resident celebrities, many of whose graves are adorned with beautifully designed monuments. Among its most renowned occupants are Irving Berlin, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Oscar Hammerstein, W. C. Handy, Fiorello LaGuardia, Bat Masterson, Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, Damon Runyon, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
ADDRESS: Webster Avenue and East 233rd
Street, Bronx, NY 10470
SUBWAY: Take the #4 train (Lexington
Avenue express) to the end of the line
(Woodlawn Station). At the base of the
station walk about a half block. The Jerome
Avenue entrance is on the right.
Alternatively, take the #2 or #5 train to
233rd Street Station. Walk three blocks
along 233rd downhill. Cross over Webster
Avenue. The cemetery entrance is on the
left.
HOURS: 8:30 A.M.–5 P.M. daily
TEL.: 718-920-0500
8. FOREST LAWN, Glendale, California
Clearly every taphophile worthy of the name will want to visit all six branches of Forest Lawn. But if, for whatever reason, you must limit yourself to a single site, the original memorial garden in Glendale is the one to see. Even the Hollywood Hills cemetery—with its magnificent Plaza of Mesoamerican Heritage, Birth of Liberty Mosaic, and replica of Boston’s Old North Church—can’t match the wonders to be seen at Glendale. Among its artistic and architectural highlights: an exact facsimile (with added fig leaf) of Michelangelo’s David, standing sixteen feet nine inches high and carved of white Carrara marble; a mosaic reproduction of John Trumbull’s famous patriotic painting The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, consisting of seven hundred thousand pieces of Venetian glass tile and measuring three times the size of the original; an immense stained-glass re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, based on the artist’s original sketches; the world’s largest wrought-iron entrance gates, surpassing in size the ones at Buckingham Palace; Polish artist Jan Styka’s panoramic depiction of the Crucifixion, said to be the largest framed painting in the world at 195 feet long by 45 feet high; and the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a “faithful reconstruction” of the little church in Glencairn, Scotland, where “bonnie Annie Laurie” of Scottish folk tradition worshipped.
There are even graves to be seen at the cemetery, though they are not, of course, blighted by anything as dreary as tombstones. Among the many celebrities interred at Glendale are Humphrey Bogart, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Walt Disney, Buddy Ebsen, W. C. Fields, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Chico Marx, Mary Pickford, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy.