Okay, the New York Times is not where I usually read News of the Weird, but this story certainly qualifies. It seems historic cemeteries, hard up for preservation funds, have turned themselves into party central.
Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar.
Laurel Hill, the resting place of six Titanic victims, promotes itself as an “underground museum.” The sold-out Titanic dinner, including a tour of mausoleums, joined the “Dead White Republicans” tour (“the city’s power brokers, in all their glory and in all their shame”), the “Birding Among the Buried” tour, and “Sinners, Scandals and Suicides,” including a visit to the grave of “a South Philly gangster who got whacked when he tried to infiltrate the Schuylkill County numbers racket.”
As Americans choose cremation in record numbers, Victorian cemeteries like Laurel Hill and Green-Wood in Brooklyn are repositioning themselves for the afterlife: their own. Repositories of architectural and sculptural treasures, like Tiffany windows and weeping marble maidens atop tombs, the cemeteries face dwindling endowments, years of vandalism and neglect, shrinking space for new arrivals and a society that, until recently, collectively distanced itself from their meandering byways.
Although their individual circumstances vary — Green-Wood in Brooklyn, a newly crowned National Historic Landmark, has space for two more years of in-ground burial, while Laurel Hill is virtually full — what they share is a daunting number of tombs in need of repair. Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the final home of Whitneys, a Woolworth, Jay Gould and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, has 95,000 grave sites.
Only 9,000 have endowments, said Susan Olsen, the executive director of the Friends of Woodlawn. “You’re a conservator,” Ms. Olsen said. “You can’t have someone up there with a bottle of Windex cleaning a Tiffany window.”
She has a point. I think my favorite project is the dog park:
Some cemeteries are betting on infotainment. At Heritage Day last weekend at the 200-year-old Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a 70-piece marching band serenaded the grave of John Philip Sousa, and dog owners held a parade for dogs dressed as historical cemetery personages, including a Union soldier.
A decade ago, prostitutes and packs of wild dogs populated the city’s oldest burial ground, which has monuments designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, designer of the Capitol. Then the preservation association began courting dog owners. Today, the 33-acre cemetery serves as a historical dog park where dogs run in Elysian fields, free to commune with the headstones. Owners pay $125 a year for the privilege, plus $40 a dog — bringing in $80,000 so far. In many ways, it is a throwback to the days of old, when then-rural cemeteries like Green-Wood and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass. (1831), rivaled Niagara Falls as romantic tourist destinations. These “gardens of graves” were settings for Sunday picnics and a precursor to Central Park and other great public spaces.
Even among the wacky and the desperate, there are some limits.
A 2005 fund-raising calendar for Oakwood Cemetery in Troy — inspired by the movie “Calendar Girls” and featuring socialites who appeared to be naked — was a tad too risqué to repeat, some thought. After objections, Green-Wood scuttled plans to show horror films.
The horror movie idea sounds kind of fun from a distance, but I can see how families of the dead might be a bit offended at the implication that their relatives might rise from the grave and rampage through town. Overall, this sounds like a cool idea to a history buff like me.
“The people who built Laurel Hill wanted these monuments to be seen,” said Mr. Mitchell of Laurel Hill. “If we do nothing, isn’t that the ultimate disrespect?”
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