The Cemetery Traveler

Warholized Cemetery Angels

2012-02-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

It’s rather odd that my own fifteen minutes of fame actually involved Andy Warhol. In the February 2012 DaVinci Art Alliance exhibit, “Warholized (The Silver Show),” one of my two photographic entries, “Vibrating Angels,” was awarded Honorable Mention. What made this truly an honor was that the judges were Andy Warhol’s niece and nephew, Madalen and James Warhola.

DaVinci’s multimedia group exhibition (February 4-26, 2012) features artistic interpretations of the impact, influence, and inspiration of Andy Warhol, on the silver anniversary of his death (25 years ago). The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue/book including essays by various Warhol notables.

For the show’s opening a couple weeks ago, the Warholas (“Warhola” was Andy’s real last name) involved the audience in a panel discussion (led by art historian and Warhol scholar Debra Miller, PhD), explaining their own art and telling stories about growing up with Uncle Andy. Madalen runs the family silkscreening business, “Warhola Designs,” and James is an illustrator. (In addition to books, he has drawn for Mad Magaine and the popular “Garbage Pail Kids” trading card series.) James was kind enough to sign a copy of his children’s book, “Uncle Andy’s Cats” for my 2-year-old daughter Olivia. (See photos from Opening Night.)

A week after the opening, it was my turn to gallery-sit. When I showed up, the gallery director congratulated me on the award, and totally surprised me by telling me that “Vibrating Angels” had been purchased on opening night. I was knocked out when he told me that Madalen Warhola bought it! This is probably the single highest art honor I’ve ever received – that my work will reside in the Warhol family collection.

At Andy's Grave (Photo by George Ondis)

“Warholized (The Silver Show)” is really a wonderful exhibit, with photography, sculpture, painting, and fabrics – some of which include the inevitable Campbell’s soup can idea. (Appropriately enough, Campbell’s sponsored the show!) You can’t really get away from this, as the soup can is Andy’s most recognizable image - so much so that people still place them on his grave in Pittsburgh!

Andy Warhol's grave, Bethel Park, PA (Photo by George Ondis)

Last month I asked my friend George, who lives in Pittsburgh, to take the cemetery photos you see here. I had visited St. John the Baptist Byzantine (note the cross on his headstone) Cemetery in Bethel Park, PA near George’s home about a decade ago, but could not locate my photos. I appreciate the fact that he made these photographs as they are much more interesting than my old snapshots - the soup cans stand out so nicely in the snow! (Note the “Warhola” name on a stone behind Andy’s.) The Andy Warhol Museum, by the way, is located in Pittsburgh, where Andy was born and grew up. This is simply an amazing place to visit.

You can visit the DaVinci Art Alliance to see the exhibit until February 26, 2012. There’s also a book that can be purchased with an image of each artist’s work along with a paragraph explaining how the artist was influenced by Andy Warhol’s art. There are fascinating essays as well, by James and Madalen Warlola, Debra Miller, poet and Warhol Factory associate Gerard Malanga, and Warhol Superstar Ultraviolet.

"Vibrating Angels," by Ed Snyder

I had to write up a bit of an artist’s statement for my work in the book. Here’s the story behind “Vibrating Angels,” a “Warholized” rendition of a photograph I made years ago in the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans:

"Vibrating Angels" - Statement

It’s been said that religion may have been Andy’s only emotion. He began and ended his professional art career with religious iconography, heavily influenced by the piety of his mother Julia. People view my own work - photographs of cemetery statuary - as religious, though in large part it addresses society's desire to come to terms with death and dying. I’ve “Warholized” one of my own images in tribute to Andy’s final decade of work, in which he seemed to contemplate the promises of popular religion. As he said about his paintings in 1985-6, "Heaven and Hell are just one breath away!"

My second piece in the show is called “Cherubs,” which you see below. I created the 20 x 20 inch print in Photoshop with two images of cherubs – the one on the left is from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the other from Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. Essentially, both “Cherubs” and "Vibrating Angels" are “digital art, ” printed on watercolor paper, as opposed to being strictly photographs. I am reminded how Warhol turned his photographs into artistic presentations using various types of media – they were no longer actually ‘photographs.’

"Cherubs," by Ed Snyder

One of the most interesting panel discussion ideas discussed at the opening of “Warholized (The Silver Show),” was "DIY POP," an app you can purchase (for your iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) from the Andy Warhol Museum that allows you to “Warholize” a photograph! Kind of wish I knew of its availability before I spent hours manually creating my images in Photoshop! (With this marvelous app, you can make your own people photo-portraits look like Warhol's famous images of Mick Jagger and Jackie O!)

"Cherubs" - Statement
In the Bottom of My Garden of cemetery angel photography, there are a few slightly suspect cherubs. I never knew what to do with them. I thought back to Warhol’s early days (1950s) when he illustrated advertising campaigns with mischievous cherubs - basically black line drawings on white, with some color added. Andy had a playful and joyous side before he adopted the Pop Art stance of distance and evasiveness. His version of folk art angels made me think about ways to give life to my own black and white cherubs. If they’re lacking color, why not follow Andy’s lead and just add some? I also spray-painted the frame for Cherubs with silver, in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of his death.

Epilogue

A few weeks before I was to deliver my work to DaVinci for the show, and picked up my prints at a local art supply store, I experienced fifteen seconds of fame. The guy taking care of my transaction told me he bought one of my photographs at a show two years ago, as a gift for his brother. I’m always flattered when people remember such things. He asked about my two prints and I told him about the upcoming Warhol-themed show. He said, “My aunt went to elementary school with Andy. She used to ride the bus with him. The only thing she ever said about him was, ‘He was a very strange bird.’”

References and Further Reading:

Title Magazine review of ‘Warholized – The Silver Show”

Central Voice Blog gets Warholized

The Warhola Family Album website
James Warhola's Mad Magazine illustrations

"Garbage Pail Kids," by James Warhola (Peel Slowly and See...?)

Death - A Love Story

2012-02-11T05:41:00.000-08:00

For this month of February, I present to you a labor of love that has totally moved people – literally so. I recently met a woman who, as a volunteer, participated in the excavation and moving of about 250 bodies from a cemetery. Her great-grandparents were among the exhumed.

Occasionally in my Cemetery Travels, I’ll come across a situation that is just too weird for words, but it doesn’t stop me from trying. This is one such situation. I don’t profess to find answers to life’s little mysteries – I just present them to you. If you find a way to wrap them in a neat package of understanding, all the better.

The woman in question was working with a group of archeologists who were carefully and respectfully removing bodies as part of a cemetery renovation. The bodies were reinterred on the other side of the cemetery. If the coffins and concrete crypts were intact, these were moved. If not, the bones and other remains and artifacts (clothing, jewelry, etc.) were boxed and buried in large concrete vaults. Along with gravestones and other markers, all this was moved to the other side of the cemetery.

Probably the most astonishing things she showed me were video still images of her interaction with her great grandparents’ remains. It was unclear whether she was as intimately involved with any other exhumations. She had an image of her grandfather’s skeleton lying inside his mostly-disintegrated wooden coffin. The photograph was taken from above, looking down into the grave. Either the coffin lid had disintegrated or was removed, and one could see his skeletal torso, head, and shoulders as he lied face up grinning at his new fans. She had another image of her holding his skull.

At the time I thought it was awfully weird and now I wonder if I could ever do such a thing. Obviously, one must become somewhat detached from the familial relationship. Her experience was certainly a labor of love, one she felt needed to be done. I didn’t think to ask if she knew them while they were alive. I certainly appreciate her candor and possible need for personal involvement, but the whole scenario is rather odd. I don’t know that I’ve ever run across anything like it in my fifteen years of Cemetery Travels.

Animal bones found in a cemetery

Finding bones in a cemetery is always a startling thing - even though you know full well you're standing on a field of bones. Most likely, however, the ones you find are the non-human kind. The photo at left is my friend Patricia holding bones of two animals found together in an abandoned cemetery. Some people even go looking for such things! I once met a woman met who makes jewelry out of tiny animal bones she finds in the woods behind an old cemetery. Apparently when owls gobble up tiny animals, they regurgitate a ball of indigestible waste (an “owl pellet”) which is comprised of the bones of their prey. (Who knew?) She hunts for these little crusty balls of regurgitated animal bits, picks them apart, and uses the bones to make lovely earrings, pendants, and necklaces.

But I stray from my story; back to the cemetery excavation. The cemetery volunteer woman had photos of coffins and vaults in various states of being unearthed. Caskets sticking out of a wall of dirt is just an odd thing to see – it’s as if you're looking at a cross-section of the cemetery ground cut about twelve feet down, the ground a honeycomb of coffins. Then she showed me photos of herself holding a section of her great-grandmother’s spinal column. Several vertebrae were fused, so she hypothesized that her ancestor had a spine problem when she was alive.

Alive. It’s really a lot different than being a box of bones, isn’t it? Our volunteer’s love story makes me wonder how you can bring yourself to touch your ancestors’ bones - especially if you had known them when they were alive. I have to admire her strength.

Would I have kept my great-grandmother’s wedding ring after slipping it off her boney white finger instead of re-burying the ring with the rest of her skeletal remains? I really don’t know. Would you? It seems like such a simple question, but really it’s a very, very deep one - a Valentine's Day question of love, commitment, and respect.

On my way home, my car stereo was playing a song by the band Bright Eyes, called, “We are Nowhere, and Its Now.” The haunting, halting lyrics went:

“I haven't been gone very long but it feels like a lifetime ...
Stars that clear have been dead for years, but the idea lives on.”

The Cemeteries of Germantown

2012-02-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Days after our mid-January tramp through Philadelphia’s Germantown cemeteries, I’m worshiping the Neti (pot) god, hoping the water doesn’t contain any parasitic brain-eating amoebas (see link at end). The frigid winter weather made my cold worse, in addition to freezing my fingertips off. But it was worth it. Two fellow cemetery travelers and I checked out St. Luke’s and St. Michael’s churchyard cemeteries in Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood northeast of center city.

I had been to both locations in the past, but my friends hadn’t. I certainly didn’t mind, as you find something new in a cemetery each time you visit. For instance, the first time I visited St. Michael’s Lutheran Church cemetery around 2006, it was just for a few minutes. I was in a hurry to get somewhere and saw it as I drove by. Never one to pass up an opportunity, I pulled over and checked it out. I came away with the "Sacred" image below and these hourglasses-and-crossbones stones. So I was anxious to spend more time there. Turns out these are the only examples I’ve ever found in Philadelphia cemeteries that have markings similar to the old skull and crossbones symbols that are so prevalent in New England.

Both St. Luke’s and St. Michael’s are fairly large cemeteries, densely populated with Civil War and Revolutionary War veterans’ graves - most notably American soldiers who fought the British in the Battle of Germantown in October 1777.

About six blocks from St. Michaels, down Germantown Avenue, is the Chew House (now known as “Cliveden”), the site of the Battle of Germantown. General Washington led his troops to attack the British on this spot, about five miles outside Philadelphia. The British, led by General Howe, won the battle, ensuring that Philadelphia, the capital of the self-proclaimed United States of America, would remain under British control throughout the winter. It was a key battle, in that it convinced the French government to side with the Americans.

"Christopher Ludwick was a resident of Germantown, a baker whom George Washington befriended at the time of the Battle of Germantown in the fall of 1777. Ludwig was a master baker of gingerbread, which seemed to one of Washington’s favorite treats. General Washington asked Ludwick (an ardent Patriot) if he would consent to becoming the Baker-General of the Continental Army, in charge of baking bread for the officers and soldiers. He consented, and thus became a part of the war effort for the Americans. He was personally responsible for causing a great many Hessians (German mercenaries) to forsake their cause and become American citizens after the war. Ludwig was also well-known for his generosity, and he funded many charities for orphan children with his estate money." (Ref.)

Ludwick is buried in St. Michael’s cemetery, having died in 1801. Both St. Luke’s and St. Michael’s appear to be closed to new burials, as we didn’t see any dates past the 1940s. St. Michaels seems quite a bit older, with graves dating back to 1742. While all the graveyards of Germantown are historic in their own right and definitely worth visiting, something about St. Michaels took me by surprise. After photographing there, I looked it up on the Internet and was amazed to find such an organized parishioner effort geared toward restoration and preservation of the cemetery! I invite you to read it on St. Michael’s website, where you’ll find photographs and historical information like the above quoted description of a quite notable grave.

The cemetery is at road level, and the iron fencing is bent and broken in spots – the unfortunate result of auto accidents on Germantown Avenue. It’s a very busy road, and apparently has been since the 1680s! Certain grave markers have actually been damaged by cars, if you can believe that. Though restoration efforts continue, many stones toward the back of the cemetery are toppled over, graffittied, and surrounded by empty beer cans. Sections of fence are missing all along the Phil Ellena Street side of the cemetery, inviting delinquents and vandals.

Axe's Burial Ground, Germantown

The ”Battle of Germantown” could actually be a current descriptor for the area’s fight to keep itself from totally collapsing under the weight of crime and urban blight. While the neighborhoods on Germantown Avenue are not horrible, they’re close. St. Michaels is just up the road from Germantown High School, where other battles rage - the students here have been known to beat up the teachers. The area around St. Luke’s is a bit safer, but not by much. It’s situated kind of between St. Michael’s and the more famous Axe’s Burial Ground further down Germantown Avenue. That area is definitely sketchy. The fortress-like wall around the burial ground thwarts vandals and has been painted with anti-graffiti paint.

A few years ago I pulled the car over to duck into a nearby package store for a cold six-pack, and was stunned to see the Asian clerk looking at me from behind bullet-proof glass. After taking my beer from behind the spinning security door, I walked out onto the avenue toward my car. Now realize that this is broad daylight on a warm Saturday afternoon. A well-dressed African-American gentleman in his seventies stopped me. In a hushed voice, he said, “Son, you really don’t want to be here.”

Times change, don’t they? While I found no additional hourglass-and-crossbones carvings in St. Michael’s cemetery, I was rather shocked to come upon a giant Roman-numeralled clock face lying amidst some stones – its bent metal hands and motor mechanism strewn across the grass. Luckily no one was standing here photographing the tombstones when it blew out of the clock tower above our heads. Time flies. After photographing the remains of the timepiece, it just got too cold to continue. Frozen on this late January day, with both my memory card and bladder full, we all beat a hasty retreat from St. Michaels’ for some winter ales and hot soup at McMenamin’s pub, a ways up Germantown Avenue, to contemplate life and all its quirks.

References and Further Reading:

Germantown Avenue (Philadelphia City Paper, 2003)

Philadelphia High School Teacher Badly Beaten by Students After Taking Away Their iPods
Louisiana Issues Neti Pot Warning After Two Fatal Infections

The Graves of Old Tampa Bay

2012-01-24T17:55:00.000-08:00

It’s so cold here in Philadelphia in mid-January that the veiled threat of snow makes me want to go to Florida for a while. So here we go. I was in Tampa a couple years ago, and spent some time in its quaint downtown Oaklawn Cemetery. If you think Florida has been northernized by all the tourists and retirees, a quick look at some of the gravestones will remind you of where you are (and where your ancestors have been!).

Oaklawn is Tampa’s oldest public burial ground, established in 1854, not long after the city itself came into being. Not having much in the way of stone quarries, the early graves had wooden markers. It was only later that residents became wealthy enough to afford “imported” (by ship) stone with which to mark their graves.

It’s a small, lovely place – quietude in the midst of a commercial area about half a mile north of Tampa Bay’s convention center. Oaklawn is surrounded by mostly government buildings, a bus depot, and bail bondsmen – a typical urban area, yet with a startling number of vacant lots. It’s almost as if all of the cemetery’s surrounding urban decay was razed in the past ten years, leaving only the Baptist church across from the entrance.

Along with the old cemetery, the church’s mission bell (lodged into its front wall) is the only extant reminder of Tampa’s historic past. It’s a colorful past with a cast of characters that includes the Ybor cigar-making family (whose tomb is here), statesmen, businessmen, Confederate soldiers, scalawags and pirates. The latter, I must confess, is the main reason I sought the place out. Photos of its pirate graves were all over the Internet and I needed to see them!

As you roam the grounds, you notice the strange old ironwork and mosaic tile unique to the craftsmen of the area (read more about that in a previous blog I wrote). Everything is shaded by trees with hanging Spanish moss. There’s an ancient oak on the side of the cemetery where the pirate graves were supposed to be (“Morgan” Street, I swear!), that is so ridiculously huge that its branches swoop down to the ground then back up again!

The place is very quiet, still, and contemplative. Maybe a little spooky. A large, rolling, concrete bed-shaped family crypt is the first thing you see as you hop over the wall from the parking area. This large (twenty feet square?) concrete structure most likely has bodies buried under it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how they would actually do that. Usually when you see an above-ground family monument, it marks the spot of an underground mausoleum. There has to be a way to access the opening in the roof of the mausoleum to add bodies. This thing didn’t seem to allow such access. Curious.

More so than the impending snow storm, what prompted me to recall my visit to Oaklawn was a blog I just read yesterday by a woman who had visited the cemetery in 2008. Something she said rang true with me, though at the time I was there, I couldn’t really put the feeling I had into words. She writes:

“I always got this feeling when I walked into this particular cemetery like you are being watched, but not by anything sinister necessarily.” (ref)

Without a doubt, I had the same feeling. Not a scary feeling, just a feeling like I was being watched. It didn’t seem to be anything worth noting at the time, but when I read the woman’s account of her visit, it brought back the feeling quite distinctly. I mentioned that Oaklawn is surrounded by a commercial area, but there weren’t many people around. It’s not a tourist site and the locals know better than to spend much time outdoors in 100-degree high-humidity heat. Not sure what was watching me.

The writer also thought she had captured orbs and apparitions on film, as she stood on the porch of the white sexton house (maintenance shed). This quaint little Victorian-type structure, whose porch overlooks a mass grave of yellow fever victims, didn’t appear on any of my memory cards, even though I photographed it. You can see a photo of it here.

As I mentioned earlier, my main reason for visiting Oaklawn was to cadge a few pics of the pirate graves, but damn if I could find them! I had directions off the Internet, I KNEW what they looked like, but I never found the blasted things! However, I might have caught a pirate spirit (below).

The cemetery was very pleasant and relatively cool, what with the majority of it shaded by trees covered with low-hanging Spanish moss. I had a Holga with me, loaded with slow film, but there really wasn’t enough light to expose the film. The only notable exception being this image of some grave markers in the vicinity of where the pirate graves were supposed to be. Now, if you want to think of the misty business in the photo as some sort of piratical apparition, be my guest. I just like it because its wonderfully creepy.

Pirate lore is rampant along the Florida coast, and for good reason.

"Florida, like all other states, has a fascinating and romantic history. Seven different flags have flown over her, not to mention the black flag of the pirates. Florida became the haven of many notorious pirates, including Blackbeard, Lafitte, Gasparilla, Kidd, Rackham, Bowlegs, Bonnett, and possibly even Morgan himself [Morgan Street borders the west side of Oaklawn] . They roamed the waters of the Caribbean Sea, and captured every ship in sight. Often, they brought their loot back to Florida, and buried it on some lonely shore. When they finally died, the location of their hidden wealth died with them. The majority of all buried treasure in Florida is the work of pirates." (ref)

A few nights later I witnessed an unexpected squall on the bay that had palm trees bent over as sheets of rain pummeled the shore and six-foot waves rocked the docks. As lightning flashed it was easy to see how a treasure-laden ship could capsize just off shore in such a tempest. Pirates that made it to land could easily have buried their booty anywhere in the area. Maybe the phantom "watchers" of Oaklawn are just checking to make sure their buried treasure is still safe.

Further Reading:

Pirate Graves by Ed Snyder
Oaklawn Cemetery Grave Photos
Tampa Cemeteries, Oaklawn Tour
Ghost Stories and Oaklawn
Florida's Pirate Past

What to Do with those Broken Old Tombstones?

2012-01-14T05:07:00.000-08:00

I heard something rather shocking the other day from the owner of a farmhouse near an old graveyard in rural Leeds, Maryland. It had to do with old broken tombstones. But just to keep you on edge for a bit, here’s the lead-in to the story.

Rural graveyards can be quite small and are difficult to locate. Even with a map, you’ll drive right past them. As I attempted to find Leeds cemetery in the rural northeastern part of Maryland, I got turned around a few times going up and down hilly country roads. Finally caught a glimpse of headstones up ahead, but it turned out to be Halloween decorations in someone's front yard!

Eventually I found the cemetery, just up the road a piece. I saw some old tombstones beyond a very old old stone wall on the north side of Leeds Road, as well as some newer ones beyond a newer stone wall on the south side. One of the most memorable things about the visit was the fact that I found the rusty old gate latch to be rusted OPEN, allowing me easy access to the graveyard.

The other side of the road had newer burials, ranging from perhaps the 1880s to this most recent one, 1984. Most of the monuments and headstones were nondescript, thought someone obviously takes care of the grounds. Everything was neat and the grass was cropped close. Woods lined the back side of the cemetery.

The older of the two halves of the cemetery, on the north side of the road, has as its showpiece, a walled-in memorial to the founder of the town of Leeds, John Wilson (you can see it at the back in this photo at right). It’s a very old, small graveyard, only about 100 by 200 feet.

The old barn bordering the cemetery had a big barking dog standing in its doorway. Its owner came home in his pickup truck as I was walking around making photographs. I waved hi, wanting to make sure he knew what I was doing, namely, NOT trespassing on his land. I was hiding behind the cemetery’s lone bit of foliage – a big old holly tree − so the dog would stop barking its fool head off. I was actually trying to photograph the barn, the dog, and the 150-year-old cemetery with the odd juxtaposition of a trailer and a Porche 928.

The dog-Porsche-home-owner came over and began telling me the history of the town and the cemetery. He believed there to be two Civil War soldiers buried beneath the holly tree (it being so florid and close to the ground that it covered whatever grave markers may have been there). Guess he didn’t realize there was also a Revolutionary War Vet here. (SAR stands for "Sons of the American Revolution.") Appropriate that this organization seeks to maintain "respect for our national symbols," as I find this old cemetery to be quite a testament to honoring the dead in a most respectful manner. At least in 2011, this seems to be the case.

Small-town graveyards often have a more interesting past than relatively larger and fancier modern cemeteries. According to this graveyard neighbor, the town’s founder, John Wilson, began by building a wool mill on nearby Little Elk Creek, then a church in 1812 up the road. (Wool from Wilson's mill was used to make a suit for then President Thomas Jefferson.) After a few houses were built, I guess it became a town. As townspeople died, they needed a graveyard. As I search for information on Wilson on the Internet, I come up with multiple familial connections, Wilson's 'Marriage Register (1832 - 1845), and this fascinating mini-biography which someone at the Maryland Historical Society photocopied in 1970. This local hero came to America from Leeds, England, and named his new town in its honor.

What I took to be a grotto for Wilson's monument, I later found to be the actual foundation of the original church that he built in 1812! Call me crazy, but I love history that you can see and touch!

So if the surrounding stone houses were built around the same time as the church (1812), the cemetery would have been about forty years old by the mid-1800s. This brings me to my point about what some of the old headstones were used for. The house bordering the cemetery (one of the town’s original three dwellings which you can see in the photo at right) belonged to the fellow who told me about the headstones. Around 1860, when bathing became all the rage (indoor plumbing), a septic tank was dug near this house. Guess what they used to line the inside walls of the tank? You guessed it, old broken tombstones!

I've run into all sorts of of uses for headstones in my cemetery travels, but that was a first for me. I did hear of a homeowner near Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia who has headstones laid into the inside wall of his basement. Even as recent as the 1940s, people just discarded old broken tombstones. There seemed to be little desire for historic preservation.

A friend of mine has his study floor tiled with small white marble headstones from an abandoned nuns’ graveyard. All of uniform size, all beginning the name with “SRM” (for “Sister Mary ____”). Apparently, a nunnery (with a graveyard out back) was abandoned at some point near his home in the 1970s. As the property fell to ruin, one enterprising individual decided to make use of the headstones. My friend is probably the third owner since the installation.

It's not unusual to see discarded headstones cemented into a cemetery's wall, or just stacked to make a wall, as I've seen in Florence Italy. Kind of a shame, really, since some of these are a fabulous testament to the stone carver's art. I mean, just look at the intricate lettering and sculpting of the willow tree on this marble stone from Leeds Cemetery. Still, people find surprising uses for these memorials and monuments to people long forgotten. For example, the paving stones that are arranged in an arc around Johnson Cemetery "Park" in Camden New Jersey, are actually laid-down headstones from African-American Civil War soldiers who are buried under the park. At Philadelphia's Mount Moriah Cemetery, you'd be surprised to see that the 'gravel' used to make up the roadways is actually bits of marble monuments and headstones. I've seen the same at the Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.

When Philadelphia destroyed Monument Cemetery (near Temple University) in 1956, headstones and grave markers from about 28,000 graves were hauled to the Delaware River and dumped in, to be used as "rip rap" (rubble from building and paving demolition commonly used to protect shorelines from water or ice erosion). Ah, but the city planners had further use for these monuments and tombstones (which were whole, not broken up) - they eventually became part of the foundation for the Betsy Ross Bridge (construction was completed in 1976)! You can still walk to the shoreline and still see them sticking out of the water (read about the rip rap atrocity here.)

So does it come as a tremendous surprise that someone used old broken tombstones to line the wall of a septic tank? Not really. As a society, I guess that's just how we roll sometimes.

Further Reading:

Read about Catholic nuns’ “Sister Mary” naming custom

"How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed," by Ed Snyder
"Lost Civil War Graves of Johnson Cemetery Park" by Ed Snyder
History of Rev. John Wilson from Maryland Historical Society
The History of Plumbing in America

Wintering at Philadelphia's Mt. Moriah Cemetery

2012-01-08T04:21:00.000-08:00

I sit in the heated sidewalk enclosure of Tony Luke’s cheese steak shop in deep South Philly, eating what may be the second best breakfast sandwich I ever had. (The first one by the way, also came from Tony Luke’s.) I’m watching the UPS trucks and car haulers take off for their morning runs as I sit inside the warm seating area.

St. Alban's Court

Cold outside, this early winter day, and supposed to get colder and windy. Perfect for an abandoned cemetery run – a hike through the wilderness that is Mount Moriah Cemetery. I pick up my friend Bob, who appropriately lives on St. Alban’s Court in West Philadelphia, where they filmed the movie, The Sixth Sense. Together we’re off to see dead things.

We park at the cemetery’s Cobb’s Creek Parkway entrance, which has been barricaded with concrete highway dividers. Before we begin our exploration around the abandoned mausoleums, I weapon up and load my cameras. This is only Bob’s second time here, so he’s not fully aware of all the things of which to be afraid. I had been told that the city pound confiscated all the wild dogs, but I took my iron ice hook just in case.

Mausoleum Ridge, Mt. Moriah in winter

Summer view of Mausoleum Ridge

As we clambered around inside the circle of mausoleums, I was surprised to see things I’d never seen here before. It’s almost as though the foliage has died a fuller death than usual − in summer, you can hardly see anything for the wildly overgrown bushes and trees, vines and pickers. The pickers and vicious thornage are REALLY what keep you from accessing any of the quaint old headstones and even the grand memorials.

It’s still a wilderness here, even though the city and volunteers spent the entire summer cleaning up portions of the place. Most of the effort had been spent on the Kingsessing Avenue side of Mt. Moriah, with its hundreds of relatively new Muslim graves and its tumble-down gatehouse. So I was surprised to see an entire section (above, Sect. 127, perhaps – see map) on the Cobb’s Creek side cleared of brush and looking the way a cemetery SHOULD look. Not only that, but we found a beautifully cared for family plot nearby, trimmed nicely with Christmas decorations at the top of the hill. This, in the midst of thousands of other graves covered with dead weeds and fallen trees.

As we make our way through the dense underbrush toward the giant rusting hulk of an iron memorial fountain, Bob tells me about growing up in a house surrounded by nine cemeteries. He’s comfortable around (and in) them, but his friends were afraid to go to his house. He’s also used to the dangers of abandoned cemeteries, as he has researched, explored, and photographed many of them in Edinburgh, Scotland. Apparently, many Scottish cemeteries are in the same deplorable condition as Mt. Moriah.

Climbing out of the tangles of vines and dead trees, we entered a clearing, and heard the dogs. Then we saw them. A small pack – three maybe. I tried to photograph them, but when I put the camera up to my eye, they darted into the high dead thicket. The barking continues as vehemently as ever. We head off in the opposite direction and talk about how stun guns and mace are illegal to buy or carry in the city of Philadelphia (though you can buy them in neighboring counties).

Winter is strange here at Mt. Moriah, with all the foliage gone – it’s almost as though you’re looking at the skeletal remains of the cemetery itself. There are hundreds of acres of dense woods shrouding massive marble and granite monuments, but the dirt roads are now walkable after the summer’s big clean-up. These roads weren’t made for giant garbage trucks, however, so the granite coping around some family plots has been scraped and broken. At least one tall granite monument is knocked over. The price of progress – at least all the piles of trash, building materials, and old tires are gone. (Just so you know, it wasn’t the barricades that stopped the illegal dumping – it actually stopped BEFORE the city locked the place down. All thanks to the zeal of one nearby resident who shall remain nameless).

People look at my photos and assume the cemetery is out in the boonies somewhere. Well no, I say, its in a densely populated, yet run down area of Southwest Philadelphia. Its size is estimated to be between 300 and 400 acres – most of which is an overgrown wilderness. A forest filled with all the grandeur of a Victorian cemetery, from the lowliest sweetly sleeping tombstone to massively ornate marble and granite monuments erected for the purpose of remembering God knows who, at this point. Bob points out that with all the negative publicity Mt. Moriah has achieved, those buried here are now remembered for a completely different reason.

Pet carrier, headstones in background

This is only Bob’s second visit to Mt. Moriah. I’ve been here so many times that nothing seems to surprise me. The more you learn about a thing, the less you pay attention, I suppose. For instance, the pet carrier we walked past. I though nothing of it, just Mount Moriah weirdness. Bob, however, deduced that someone had let their small animal loose in the wild, to fend for itself or get eaten by a coyote. He must have a sixth sense about such things. I thought of the small lame dog I saw here once, dragging itself through the weeds. But why leave the carrier here, with the door open? Because the person didn’t want to be seen leaving with an empty animal carrier. Ah.

We spend a few hours first on the Cobb’s Creek side, then make our way over to the Kingsessing Avenue side. I’ve been here so many times I’ve lost my early, wide-eyed reaction to this overgrown wrecked hull of a cemetery. Still, I’m surprised at the piles of deer droppings here and there. You’d think with the dense woods, this place would be lousy with deer, but I’ve never seen one.

Most of the picker bushes at Mt. Moriah are dead for the season. Those that survive, however, can tear through armor. They are the worst here in the Circle of St. John as we try to navigate around the central marble monument to the Masonic Grand Tyler. It‘s shocking that someone went to the trouble to get all the way in here just to spray paint the monuments. It does seem to be a popular destination – empty beer cans abound and I find a burned American flag on the ground.

We talk about how to restore this place, on a piecemeal basis. When you think hundreds of acres of overgrown woodland, it does seem rather impossible. The place looks more like an improbable act of will than a result of simple neglect. So why aren’t movies being filmed in here? Certainly it would be very difficult to build something like this as a Hollywood movie set. Maybe film producers would think the viewing public would never believe such a place could exist. Why did Philadelphia allow this to happen to an historic landmark? Whatwould the Eiffel Tower look like today if it were in Philadelphia instead of Paris?

More dogs circle us. Great – we’ve got them on both sides. (Why is it that wild animals never attack people you WANT them to attack?) I kind of wanted to move further back to where dense trees hid some quite ornate dynasty plots, but Bob indicated that there were more dogs coming from that direction. I fondle the hook in my large coat pocket, enjoying the menacing power it gives me whenever I touch it. Then it occurs to me that one hook might not be adequate protection if TWO of us are attacked by several dogs. I blithely asked him what he would rather do. He said, we should probably head in the direction of the gatehouse (away from the dogs). I said, well, yeah, that would be the sensible thing to do, but what do you want to do? He was a bit uncomfortable with the proposition so we moved out of harm’s way.

I had this notion of an action hero called “The Hook,” who sits down with Bob at this point and says, “Now listen – this is CEMETERY photography we’re about here,” as our hero, without turning, takes a mighty swipe at a vicious dog leaping through the air toward them. The hook connects, the dog cries and runs off.

We walked toward the back of the crumbling gatehouse, really nothing more than a façade of crumbling brownstone, at this point; the clinging vines actually holding what’s left of the structure together. I spent a few minutes photographing the statue of Father Time behind it while Bob investigated the ruins of the gatehouse. “Looks like they’ve cleaned this place up a bit,” he said, noting the absence of broken tombstones, piles of old tires, and assorted garbage.

A few minutes later he came walking toward me and I asked him if he wanted to go around to photograph the front of the gatehouse. He said, “I don’t think so − someone has taken up residence in there.” Yikes. Bet that guy hasn’t had a Tony Luke’s breakfast sandwich in a while. So we headed off back in the direction of my car, a good twenty-minute walk across the cemetery. The weather turned windy and colder as I thought about Philadelphia’s upcoming Homicide Parade, meant to lament the city’s Big 300 murder rate for 2011. Yay.

Gatehouse at Kingsessing Ave., Mt. Moriah Cemetery

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Bob Reinhardt, Tom Bera, and Donna for their inspiration in helping me write this article.

Evergreen for the Holidays

2012-01-03T04:17:00.000-08:00

For a totally joyless experience, drive or walk through an abandoned cemetery at Christmas time. That said, I waited until New Year’s Day to take a drive through Camden, New Jersey’s Evergreen Cemetery (an ironic name if ever there was one). I'd like to say that it is old, elegant, and beautifully restored, but such is not the case. A wreck of a graveyard, the shock of its graffiti-painted roadways are only eclipsed by sunken graves into which you can see ancient brick vaults and exposed wooden coffins.

A light, intermittent rain is hurrying to go nowhere, the wan sky casting an even illumination on the busted monuments. I expected to take some photos out the car window or through the rainy glass, making all blurry and cool images (but I forgot to do that). One thing that threw my concentration was the fact that the workshed door was ajar.

Note bike at lower right in photo

I’d never before seen this small cinderblock building open. As I drove by, I could see it was empty, except for a bicycle. Two scraggly artificial Xmas wreaths hung awkwardly off the edges of the wire door corners. Huh. I drove past, getting out to photograph the graffiti painted on the driveway in front of it. As I got back in my car, I was startled to see a man in his early thirties come out of the doorway holding the bike. He stood there all nonchalant. As I drove past him, I started to roll down the window to jokingly ask with faux sincerity, “Are you the caretaker?” But I reconsidered – I could end up on the wrong side of a gun.

So I slowly drove past, avoiding eye contact. This is always a good tactic as they know you can’t identify them. Camden is the second most dangerous city in America, cemeteries included. City officials and police have stated that massive budget problems and a deteriorating infrastructure have eroded the city's ability to keep the peace. In an article for The Philadelphia Inquirer, one resident summed up Camden's woes with what is surely the scariest quote you'll hear all day, "We don't have any real policing in Camden. They're just out here to pick up the bodies."

Sunken grave, Evergreen Cemetery

I drove around the back of Evergreen, making photographs here and there, when I noticed from across the cemetery the guy with the bike guy was still standing at the entrance of the workshed. Then I noticed another man, about the same age, walking into the cemetery carrying a white plastic bag. Um, there really is no LEGAL reason for two guys to be in an abandoned cemetery in the middle of the day in the RAIN. As I was ready to head out the entrance and leave them to their dealing, I noticed a sunken grave. The earth had collapsed about three feet down and you could see the brick arch of an underground crypt roof – and an old wooden coffin! Well, their business matters would just have to wait. Though I certainly didn’t want to get shot, I needed to get this shot.

Even in this pseudo-maybe, maybe not really abandoned cemetery, you see leftover Xmas decorations on some of the graves. I saw six small stones in a family row, each with its own wreath and red bow. So relatives still visit decrepit, tumble-down cemeteries. There are still people who care about those who’ve set out ahead of the rest of us. While that doesn’t make the experience joyful, per se, it does to some extent restore one’s faith in humanity. Xmas decorations in a cemetery are like angel statues – they don't do anything for the deceased, but they benefit the living by softening the blow and honoring the memory of those long gone.

After driving around for another ten minutes, the wind and rain got stronger, so photographically, I stuck a fork in it – I was done. I drove out the gate, past the guy with the plastic bag who was just STANDING inside the cemetery entrance waiting for me to leave. I made sure not to make eye contact. Cemeteries are filled with good discovery. You hang around them and you can’t help but learn things – mostly about yourself.

Further Reading:

Camden runner-up for most dangerous city

Camden Named 2nd Most Dangerous City in America

Graves Sinking into Ground

2011-12-31T08:36:00.000-08:00

Sounds redundant, doesn't it? Unfortunately, yesterday on the news (FOX 29), there was a story about a huge sink hole that appeared in Allentown Pennsylvania (about 60 miles north of Philadelphia). Sink holes, for the uninitiated, are chunks of land that collapse downward into open space, space usually created (in northeast PA anyway), by old coal mines. The effect is similar to a sunken grave, when the old wooden coffin disintegrates and collapses into itself. This creates a void in the earth that allows the ground to fall - I'm sure you've seen such depressions in the earth as you've walked through old cemeteries. (If a concrete vault is used to hold the coffin, this doesn't occur.)

I didn't take any of these photos you see here - they're all from the website LehighValleyLive.com. You can visit their site to see and read more. I have been to some of the Allentown cemeteries.

The sink hole appears to have given way in the middle of a street, and will prompt the demolition of at least two nearby homes. You can see portions of West End Cemetery in the photos. The coroner has gotten permission to exhume and move bodies if need be.

This is in the historic "Old Allentown" district of the city. Watch this Fox 29 news video to appreciate the magnitude the problem. (Listen to the part about the guy whose foot went through his basement floor and the hole started to fill up with water!) When a sink hole occurs, no one really knows when it will stop growing or even how deep it is! This particular one may take weeks to fill and repair. Even more frightening is the possibility of underground mine fires associated with sink holes, the most infamous ones that burned for decades turning Centralia, PA, into the ghost town it is today.

It appears that the Allentown sink hole caused a water main break, adding insult to injury. A dozen homes near North Tenth and West Chew streets have been evacuated.

I used to live about fifty miles further north than Allentown, in far northeast PA, Larksville, to be exact. The mountain my parents lived on actually smoked - a light smoke would always be coming from the ground as underground mine fires slowly burned the coal buried down deep. You wonder how people live like that, but they do. Sink holes, big and small, were also a way of life - a result of a hundred years of deep vein coal mining in the region.

Back in the 1970s, my Mom worked as a part-time housekeeper for a family in an affluent section of nearby Kingston, PA. One day she heard the teenage daughter scream from the basement. She ran from the first-floor kitchen to the basement door and started to run down the steps. She looked down and saw the girl at the bottom of the stairs watching in horror as the bathroom slowly disappeared into an ever-widening hole in the floor! My Mom grabbed the girl's hand and pulled her up the stairs, and out of the house! No one was hurt - physically, anyway. Property values, as you can imagine, plummeted.

Grave Decorations - Christmas in the Cemetery

2011-12-18T04:16:00.000-08:00

For the special season of Christmas, I’m putting aside my usual erudite, logical, and authoritative prose (stop laughing, I can HEAR you) – to examine why people decorate graves at Christmas. As opposed to just asking them, I’m going to just tell you what I think. It’s far less complicated that way.

Of all the holes that may exist in your life, driving through a cemetery at Christmas time can identify a big one. It reminds you of things to come, while making you glad you’re not there yet. That said, a cemetery at Xmas may be the only physical entity that Heisenberg didn’t account for, when he wrote that the simple presence of an observer changes things. Do you really think your presence in a cemetery ever changes it? How about the act of setting up and decorating a full-sized Christmas tree? If anything, it makes the whole thing even more depressing.

A cemetery is a figurative rock (filled with actual rocks) − an impenetrable fortress of stone built by an equally strong belief system. Author Salman Rushdie might refer to a cemetery as an “ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties." Christmas is another tradition, a very strong one for us mackerel-snappers (as an old Jewish guy friend of mine used to call Christians). So why not tie the two together? Surely the florists and garden centers would have us believe that everyone needs a “grave blanket,” or a wreath for the mausoleum door. Give ‘em points for trying, but they haven’t influenced mass behavior anything like the Hallmark card company has. Decorating graves at Christmas seems to have not quite gone public.

I guess the guerilla florists who set up in parking lots target Christians because it’s such a widely-celebrated Christian holiday. Maybe we’re more gullible? Why else would we decorate graves with Santas and reindeer? Hanukkah is a week before Christmas, yet I don’t see the florists hawking sparkling blue menorahs or cute little foam dreidels with which to decorate Jewish children’s graves (in fact, I’ve never even seen a Jewish grave decorated for Hanukkah). Since we haven’t all succumbed to the commercial brainwash, there must be something very personal about placing Christmas decorations on graves. I've even seen poinsettias and wreaths on graves in abandoned cemeteries! Makes you realize that even though a cemetery may be abandoned, not all of its residents may be.

Christmas is of course a Christian holiday, and Christians decorate their homes and malls to make everything feel more cozy − but why cemeteries? To include their departed loved ones in the festivities? Christ-MISS may just bring to mind all the people we miss.

Grave Decorations

"Remember your loved ones this holiday season with a hand-made grave blanket or grave pillow from Dayton's. Commemorate your beloved's grave with sprays of Blue Spruce and Pine along with waterproof ribbons and bows."

Of course there’s also the flip side of sentiment and honoring one’s memory – that of not letting go. In this respect, the loss just keeps on giving. “We’re in a psychologically menacing month when unresolved emotional conflicts, loneliness and other problems influence our behavior.” (ref) Popular wisdom tells us that more people commit suicide at Xmas than any other time of year. While Christmas can be depressing for many people, this is simply not true (Read more here) - but it’s easy to believe. (Studies have shown this to be the only suicide link to the calendar: more of them occur early in the week and fewer on the weekend.)

"There's got to be a build-up to the day that Christ was born.
The halls are decked with pumpkins and ears of Indian corn.
Dragging through the falling leaves in a one-horse open sleigh.
Suddenly it's Christmas seven weeks before the day.

Suddenly it's Christmas the longest holiday.
When they say 'Season's Greetings' they mean just what they say.
It's a season, it's a marathon retail eternity
And it's not over til it's over and you throw away the tree."

“Suddenly It's Christmas” by Loudon Wainwright III; lyrics © DOWNTOWN MUSIC PUB LLC OBO SNOWDEN MUSIC, INC.(ASCAP)

According to the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III, this is because Christmas is not a single day that’s celebrated, but an entire SEASON. So if you’re expecting to be sad and alone at Christmas, you won't just be sad and lonely on December 25th – you’ll be sad and lonely for two months. Even Valentine’s Day only lasts one day! A girlfriend of many months once broke up with me on Valentine’s Day. The actual day, right after a nice dinner out. Some people have impeccable timing, you know? But even in such a dismal situation, it’s simply the DAY that may remind you of the event a year later. On the contrary, if your Mom died on December 16th, this occurrence during the Christmas “season” is going to stay with you for many more.

"Christmas carols in December and November too.
It's no wonder we're depressed when the whole thing is through.
Finally it's January, let's sing Auld Lang Syne
But here comes another party shaped like a Valentine."

Which is not to say you're psychologically safe if your Dad died in August, as mine did. Christmas is traditionally when the family gets together. So when you're all sitting down for Christmas dinner five years hence, everyone still feels the empty space left by the missing person. Christmas brings the memory back. Which in some ways, is a good thing, of course. But do you REALLY want to go mucking about with all those Christmas decorations in the cemetery? Maybe it would be best to just drop the spray of pine boughs on your loved one’s grave and go back to life among the living.

And Furthermore .....

How to Decorate a Grave Site

Listen to Loudon Wainwright's "Suddenly It's Christmas."

175 Years of Reflections, Laurel Hill Cemetery

2011-12-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

This year, the commemorative book 175 Years of Reflections, Laurel Hill Cemetery, 1836 – 2011 was published. It’s lovely, coffee table-sized, and hard-bound, filled with personal reflections on Laurel Hill by scores of (mostly live) people. A few years prior, I was asked if I would donate one of my Laurel Hill photographs to be in it − quite an honor. My image, “Colder than Ice on a Tombstone (2008)” appears on page 125.

Ed Snyder's "Colder than Ice on a Tombstone"

Available at Blurb.com

It’s one thing to force your own art on the world by writing your own book, but to be asked to be in someone else’s book is very flattering and meaningful. I do want to thank all the people involved in putting the book together, and for recognizing the emotional connection of all the contributors.

The format of 175 Years of Reflections is quite clever – “ … a collection of 175 remembrances about the cemetery, dating all the way back to its founding to the present day and includes poems, journal entries and much more.” (The website Geekadelphia continues,) “Through these you get a picture of what the Laurel Hill Cemetery has meant to people and to the city of Philadelphia. It really is a unique way to understand something that has been a part of this city for so long.”

Image by Frank Rausch (p. 110)

In April 2011, the Friends of Laurel Hill held a book launch at the cemetery. All contributing parties were invited. I knew one or two of my compatriots, but was not prepared for the dozens of people who showed up. Many of whom I’d only known through the press, such as Tom Keels (author of several books, including Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries), as well as others whose art was familiar to me, e.g. internationally known photographer Bob Reinhardt.

Image by Marietta Dooley (p. 155)

It was a great social event for Philadelphia artists and writers - I made new friends like Marietta Dooley (whose photograph in the book graces the cover of Laurel Hill’s current tour guide) and enjoyed talking with familiars Frank Rausch and Scott Kreilick. Frank’s always got great stories as he lives in the cemetery, and Scott’s historical conservation company is responsible for restoring the “Old Mortality” statue grouping housed at Laurel Hill’s entrance.

"Old Mortality"

A copy of the book was very generously given to each contributing artist and author, whose work exemplified their own personal reflections of Laurel Hill Cemetery. As we lined up to receive our copy, people were thrilled to find that the organizers had taken the time to mark the page of the contributor’s work with a tall bookmark bearing the contributor’s name. Talk about attention to detail!

Image by Bob Reinhardt (p. 165 )

The event was incredibly well organized. Yards beer (Philadelphia’s best) and oer d'oeuvres were served, name tags given out, a tent and chairs to listen to the speeches. Gwen Kaminski (Laurel Hill’s Director of Development & Programs) read her poetry and Tom Keels spoke touchingly about his early visits to Laurel Hill. I remember quite vividly a line from one young man’s speech in which he mentioned “the very human desire to be remembered after death.” The note included in each book from the “Friends of Laurel Hill” organization seemed to expand on this philosophic idea:

"Well beyond the year of Laurel Hill Cemetery’s 175th anniversary and, indeed, well beyond the life spans of those of us who are here to be part of it, this book will remain an enduring symbol of the language and art, of the life and death embodied by Laurel Hill. As a permanent addition to our archives, its words and images will inspire future generations of the living, and your own name will be forever linked with the history of America’s first National Historic Landmark cemetery." - Friends of Laurel Hill

What a wonderful sentiment! As far as my own photography and writings, I’ve leaned heavily on the creepiness of cemeteries, but that can be an unsteady rail. There really is just too much beauty and life in and around a cemetery like Laurel Hill to dwell on negative aspects. 175 Years of Reflections pulls together poems, stories, historical family photographs, fine art images, paintings, old lithographs, even children’s drawings − REFLECTIONS, quite literally, on people’s POSITIVE experiences at the cemetery.

Cover detail

After the formal presentations outdoors, people were invited to stroll the grounds on this lovely spring day, or adjourn to the museum/gallery in the gatehouse. One could view the exhibits of historic memorabilia related to everything from Harry Kalas (the late Phillies sportscaster) to George Meade (lauded Civil War general), both of whom are buried at Laurel Hill.

During the informal milling about - and much to my surprise - various people came up to me and asked if I would sign page 125, on which my photograph was printed. Quite flattering, I must say. By the way, the title of my image, “Colder Than Ice on a Tombstone," is not dedicated to my ex-wife, as some might imagine. It was quite literally how I felt that winter's day in 2008 as I lay on Laurel Hill’s ice-encrusted snow to make the photograph. Quite opposite of the warm and friendly ambiance everyone enjoyed at Laurel's book launch party!

Books by Ed Snyder:

Available at Amazon.com

Available at Blurb.com

Further Readings:

175 Years of Reflections, Laurel Hill Cemetery , 1836 – 2011 available at Laurel Hill Cemetery and through its website

Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries by Tom Keels
Photographic Art by Frank Rausch
Rest in Pixeks, Robert Reinhardt's website
Kreilick Conservation, LLC

The Condemned Lafayette Cemetery

2011-12-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

As you’ll recall from last week’s blog, Bloody Cemetery Apparition, one of the 47,000 displaced souls from on old condemned South Philly cemetery decided to hang out with my son and I for a spell. The fact that Chris saw it too made me feel a bit more sane.

As I commenced to dig into the history of Lafayette Cemetery (which was across the street from the famous Pat’s and Geno’s cheesesteak restaurants until 1947), the situation that presented itself appeared quite gruesome. But let me first take you back a couple years for a key part of the puzzle.

My friend Ken lives in Bensalem, PA, on the outskirts of northeast Philadelphia. As he is well aware of my obsession with cemeteries, he often tells me about interesting graveyards he’s seen in his travels. Near Bensalem is the Neshaminy Mall. Across Neshaminy Boulevard from the mall is a field of grass with a small monument in it. Ken stopped to look at it a couple years ago and told me he thought it was there because graves had been found in the field during some excavation.

Fast-forward to 2011 as I’m researching the history of Lafayette Cemetery. Turns out that the site across from the Macy’s side of the mall is where many of the bodies from Lafayette were buried. Happens all the time (or at least it used to) − a cemetery gets relocated, unidentified or unclaimed remains get reburied in a mass grave. Ah, but it turns out that such was not exactly the case here – by finding the site, we only set aside the first vial of the mystery.

Field monument across from Neshaminy Mall

While a good portion of the 47,000 bodies from Lafayette were buried here, they weren’t buried in the most dignified fashion. Consider this excerpt from the October 9, 1988 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Thomas A. Morris, president of Evergreen Memorial Park in Bensalem Township, was contracted to dig up 47,000 sets of remains from the run-down Lafayette Cemetery in South Philadelphia.

Under the terms of a 1946 Common Pleas Court decree, the bodies were to be buried again on 40 of the 156 acres owned by Evergreen, complete with caskets, drainage, new bronze markers, roadways and perpetual maintenance of the grounds. In return, Morris received clear title to the old cemetery property, bounded by Passyunk Avenue and Ninth, 10th, Federal and Wharton Streets."

Not only did Morris not bury the remains in the agreed upon fashion, but he soon sold the South Philly land to investors for $105,000 - who then sold it back to the city for $153,500! This may not seem like a lot of money now, but in 1947, $100,000 had the buying power of just over a million dollars (by 2011 standards).

Unscrupulous financial wheeling and dealing aside, the travesty here is that most of the 47,000 graves were not reburied as they were supposed to be. No tombstones were erected with the graves. What did he do with the old tombstones? We now know that Morris dumped most of the bodies in unmarked trenches on the outskirts of his Evergreen Cemetery property (in Bensalem , PA), as well as some in Bensalem’s Poquessing Creek (according to eyewitnesses!!).

The only reason the public is aware of any of this is because of an accidental unearthing of some wooden coffins on the old Evergreen site in 1988. A strip mall was being built, and the graves were discovered during its construction. Investigations turned up the following:

"After spending a week and a half digging test shafts at the site, officials last week said they had uncovered what probably are 32 trenches, each 300 feet long. Inside the trenches are stacks of wooden boxes, presumably containing most of the remains." (ref)

Are they really resting in peace?

The marker was only placed at the site in 1988 after the mass grave was accidentally discovered. Two bronze plaques flank it, dedicated to Civil War veterans known to have been buried at Lafayette. After Morris’ onerous actions became apparent, investigations continued into his other deal with the city for moving Franklin Cemetery in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. In 1948, Morris was paid another $100,000 to move 8,000 bodies. Of that number, about 5,000 are unaccounted for!

Now realize that in the 1940s and 1950s, the vast majority of people thought stodgy old graveyards were an eyesore and should be eradicated. Victorian architecture, ironwork, and stone carvings were thought to be gauche. Given a cemetery that was a hundred years old where the few descendants that cared (and had the money) had already moved their loved ones out, the public really wasn’t concerned about where the bodies went. I can’t help but wonder now how the owners of those expensive suburban homes near the Neshaminy Mall felt after learning that there were thousands of mouldering corpses in their backyards.

But that’s probably no weirder than human remains under the Capitolo Playground. I mean think about it – there must be some there. When you look at the size of the Bensalem land in question, its hard to believe 47,000 bodies could be buried there − even if the hole was REALLY deep. My guess is that many of the original graves still reside under the Capitolo Playground in South Philly. The City of Philadelphia pays this guy $105,000 to dig up the bodies and rebury them elsewhere, but doesn't check to make sure he actually DID that properly. Then the city buys it back (for $54,000!) to build a playground. He knows they’re just going to pave some areas and plant grass in others – so he has no incentive to fully excavate the grounds and remove every grave!

"In 1951, the Securities and Exchange Commission began to look into Morris' dealings - particularly his apparent habit of selling large blocks of Evergreen Cemetery lots to speculators with the promise that the investors would be able to sell them for huge profits. The sales, according to the SEC, were in the same category as sales of securities, and Morris was not registered to sell securities.

Morris began to pile up debts, with the federal government filing tax liens against Evergreen Memorial Park. In 1958, the Pennsylvania Securities Commission asked that the courts appoint a receiver for Evergreen. In 1959, Evergreen filed for bankruptcy." (ref)

Capitolo Playground

The new owners renamed Evergreen Cemetery Rosedale Memorial Park, which exists on the site to this day. It is a well-maintained active cemetery. I guess after finding all this out I’m surprised that we don’t have MORE ghostly sightings in the area of the Capitolo Playground given the vast amount of graveyard residents who were so vilely disturbed from their final resting places. I think about the guy in the bloody suit who sat down with me and my son Chris, about WHERE his body may have ended up. Maybe he's still searching for it. And where ARE all those thousands of other bodies …?

References:
A TALE OF 47,000 BODIES, FINAL RESTING PLACE UNKNOWN
(The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 1988)

Bloody Cemetery Apparition (Last week's Cemetery Traveler blog posting)

Bensalem, Roots Web

Bloody Cemetery Apparition

2011-12-05T03:54:00.000-08:00

People ask me if I see ghosts in cemeteries. I see and hear weird stuff from time to time, but it doesn’t always manifest itself in any clear way. In other words, its not like seeing Casper floating above a headstone.

Back in 2003 I had an interesting experience at Geno’s Cheese Steak restaurant in South Philly - the last place you'd expect to see a ghost. However, the realization of what I had seen only became evident to me last week (November, 2011), a full eight years after the occurrence!

As I was writing last week’s blog, Thanksgiving and Abandoned Cemeteries, I mentioned Capitolo playground in South Philly, and how it used to be a cemetery. I didn’t know this until a year or so ago when I heard the current owner of Pat’s Steaks (I think he’s the grandson of the founder), talk on the radio about how his grandfather used to play baseball with his friends in the old, run-down graveyard. They’d jump over the broken headstones (I can picture them using broken pieces for bases). The cemetery was condemned and plowed over in the mid-1940s so the city could build an actual park and athletic field.

Basketball by night in Capitolo Playground

Capitolo playground is next to Pat’s and Geno’s, the famous cheese steak emporiums in south Philly. The fast-food mavens face each other with folded arms at Ninth Street and Passyunk Avenue. In the summer of 2003, I had taken my thirteen-year-old son Christopher to Ozzfest and on the way home we stopped at Geno’s Steaks for some fries and a cheesesteak. Directtly across the street from Geno’s outdoor picnic table seating area is the Capitolo Playground. Although it was midnight, the basketball courts were lit up and games were in progress. It’s not unusual to have to stand in a line of twenty people to get waited on here this time of night.

Geno’s is a neon nirvana, a colorful Las Vegas Strip sort of thing. Chris and I found one unoccupied sidewalk picnic table, made ourselves comfortable and began to chow down. We sat across from each other, chatting about the concert. Me trying to subtly elicit an agreement from him that he doesn’t necessarily have to tell all his friends about the topless girls in the audience, him still wide-eye and wired from the experience. I wondered how long it would take this information to get back to his mother and resigned myself to the fact that I would never receive any sort of “Father of the Year” award.

Then the old guy sat down next to me. Not sure where he came from, just off the street on the playground side, out of the dark. I glanced at him and as I said “Hey,” noticing with some horror that he had dried blood all over his suit coat, as well as on his face. His hair was slicked into an old style and his dark suit was way outdated. I looked back at my son and attempted to resume our conversation. Chris would glance at the man, then at me with a slight grin on his face, like “What the F…?”

We continued eating our cheese fries and steaks as the neon glared around us. The man never said a word, just stared ahead. People walked by the condiment station, never once acknowledging the strange guy sitting next to me. Basketball games continued across the street, no one in the line of people at the ordering window not so much as glancing our way. He got up after maybe ten minutes. Chris and I both looked after this tall, thin guy as he slowly walked off into the street, disappearing into the crowd. The clean, old-fashioned yet well-pressed suit, splattered with blood, stands out in my mind more than his face. Can’t much recall what he looked like. Chris and I discussed the weirdness of his presence and wondered what it was all about. Then I forgot about the incident for eight years.

It was a year ago that I discovered the playground across from Pat’s and Geno’s was once a cemetery. Now, sixty-five years later, the site is a full city block comprised of baseball and soccer fields, basketball courts, a little kids’ playground (my two-year-old daughter Olivia loves it), an arts center, and a community garden (ewww…). It wasn’t until I was writing last week’s blog that it dawned on me that the bloody guy may have been one of the restless souls from what used to be called Lafayette Cemetery.

Lafayette Cemetery before demolition, c. 1946

In 1946 the city condemned Lafayette Cemetery as part of a multimillion-dollar playground-building project, which ultimately amounted to a huge real estate swindle. The guy with whom the city contracted to remove the bodies and rebury them in the suburbs, didn't actually do what he was supposed to do. The object was for the city to pay him about about $100,000 to do this, then allow him to sell the land back to the city at a $50,000 profit! In 1946, you can imagine that this was an enormous amount of money. Until 1988, no one really knew (or apparently cared) what he did with the bodies.

Lafayette Cemetery AFTER demolition, c. 1947

I'm going to make you tune in next week to find out what happened to the bodies, but in the meantime, savor this account from the article, "Lafayette Cemetery," published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 1988:

“Joe Giunta, who grew up on the 1300 block of Passyunk Avenue, remembers when, around the time those interred were removed, "a processional with hundreds of men crying" came through the streets. He believes the ceremony was held to honor those who would find final resting places at Evergreen [Cemetery] -- or so many thought. …The investigation revealed that Lafayette bodies were dumped in unmarked trenches on the Evergreen site, which Bensalem [Pennsylvania] officials said bore little resemblance to a cemetery as most people know it, the article said. The final resting place of many of the original Lafayette inhabitants remains unknown to this day.” (ref)

My guess is that there are a lot of disturbed spirits hanging out around Capitolo Playground - maybe 47,000 of them. One of them, the bloody guy, may have made himself visible to my son and I that night in 2003. Why, I wonder? Catch my blog next week as I continue to unravel the mystery of Lafayette Cemetery.

References:
Temple University Urban Archives
Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries, by Thomas H. Keels

Thanksgiving and Abandoned Cemeteries

2011-11-24T11:53:00.000-08:00

Its six a.m. and raining outside. I’m nursing a head cold. Still, I’m thanking the Lord for yet another day above ground. It is Thanksgiving Day, as it happens. Rainy, bleak mornings like this make me think of abandoned graveyards, and how the cold and dismal rain beats down on the old stones. It can be a pitiful sight.

Prior to my cemetery travels, I don’t remember even being aware of the existence of an “abandoned cemetery.” Surely, when I bring up the subject at parties, people look at me funny. You’d be surprised how many folks are unfamiliar with the concept. They might ask, “How do cemeteries become 'abandoned?'" Well, that’s the topic for today, friends. How do they become abandoned? And what happens to them after they attain this substandard status?

Mount Vernon Cemetery, Philadelphia

Well, first off, what do we mean by ‘abandoned?’ Intuitively, we would think no new burials have occurred in decades, and there is no “perpetual care” of the graves. Relatives stopped visiting ages ago. The place becomes overgrown and filled with trash. While this is mostly true, there are actually LEGAL definitions. For instance, state of Missouri law says an abandoned cemetery is one in which no one has been buried for at least 25 years (RSMo 214.131).

Resurfaced Texas Cemetery

When I was headed for Texas last spring, I went searching for abandoned cemeteries on the Internet, when I realized, “Hey, there are ghost towns throughout the old west!” In many of these deserted places, the last structures standing are – you guessed it – tombstones. A news item was brought to my attention last week by my friend Renee Rausch: a Texas town, complete with cemetery – recently reappeared as the lake covering it dried up in a drought! Tex-Atlantis had been submerged beneath 30 feet of water for the past 50 years! There are little forgotten small-town graveyards still standing all across America,from long-gone 1850s gold and silver mining towns in California and Nevada to long-exhausted coal mining towns in Pennsylvania.

There are probably hundreds of reasons why cemeteries get abandoned − I’ve only run into a few of them. Religious sect cemeteries that are left standing and unattended after the congregation is disbanded (a la B'nai Israel Cemetery in West Philly). Private little family plots on the old homestead (I’ve seen these in Virginia), where the homestead had long ago been divvied up and sold off as small land parcels leaving the little graveyard in the woods. Or the farmer’s field where they’ve plowed around an island of headstones for as long as anyone can recall. Facebook friends tell me these exist all over the country. In some states, you have legal right to cross private property to visit a cemetery that has no public access!

Philadelphia's Mt. Moriah Cemetery

Most people think cemeteries simply exist. You know, just hovering out there on the fringes of polite society. Far from fact. Even if you had come across the reality of an abandoned cemetery, you probably never even thought about how it got that way. People may ask, “How could ‘they’ let it go to pieces like that?” The key word here is ‘THEY.’ In the case of Philadelphia’s most notorious abandoned cemetery, Mount Moriah (which happens to also be the largest cemetery in Pennsylvania), the owners can’t be found. They’ve all long since died and there’s no one left from the original board of directors to take responsibility for the upkeep of this several-hundred-acre overgrown forest. The city has an albatross on its hands.

Sometimes I think we have the same false notions about cemeteries as we have about Thanksgiving (which had nothing to do with turkey and pumpkin pie, or giving thanks, for that matter). Thanksgiving Day was a single event in 1621, one day when politics brought pilgrims and Indians together. Tension and posturing by each group was evident as Pilgrims and Indian tribes attempted to ensure their own survival. What has come to be accepted as a harvest celebration or day of thanks wasn’t even referred to as “Thanksgiving” day until 1841. Thanksgiving as we know it did not become a national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln could no longer take the relentless badgering by Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale. He conceded that it might help national unification after the Civil War. Needless to say, the idea of a New England-originated Thanksgiving Day Holiday was not embraced by Southern states.

But I seem to be getting off track here. I apologize. My narrative may become more linear as the effects of whatever medication I ingested last night wears off. The Native American community calls our Thanksgiving Day their “National Day of Mourning,” the day they mourn the genocide of their ancestors and the theft of their land. This largely fabricated holiday of ours is a prime example of history re-written to make us feel better about ourselves. Kind of reminds me of the following story.

Franklin Cemetery, c. 1940

When you read about how bodies are reinterred elsewhere so a cemetery can be repurposed, think about what happened to the residents of Philadelphia’s Franklin Cemetery in the 1940s. This cemetery in the city’s Kensington neighborhood was at the center of a political swindle gone bad. Its 8,000 buried bodies disappeared when someone was promised a huge profit if he sold the cemetery land back to the city after the bodies had been removed. An outraged citizen (Margaret Alice Butler) even wrote a song about it! Part of it goes like this:

"I'm telling you, in this day and age,

The dead people aren't even safe.

. . . Everyone's out for that almighty dollar.
Now only if the dead could holler."

What can happen after a cemetery is abandoned is that it can get condemned and then obliterated, if the land has any value. The bodies are (theoretically) moved and the land is repurposed. That’s the case with the photo at the beginning of this article. It may seem shocking, and it is. In 1922, Philadelphia condemned the Hanover Street Burial Ground, and left it up to relatives of the deceased to remove the bodies!

The Business of Running a Cemetery

Unless a non-profit group is responsible for it, a cemetery is run as a business. As such, it is susceptible to all the financial problems any business might experience – a bad year, a drop in popularity, embezzlement of funds by the owners or other financial mismanagement, and of course, over time, it can become filled up, so no more burials are possible!

Discarded tombstones along Delaware River

After cemeteries are abandoned, what happens to them? The Hanover Cemetery situation is one hard dose of reality. A derelict cemetery can be an eyesore, blight on the community. Back in the 1950s, people just were not into cemetery upkeep like they are today – it could easily get plowed over in the name of urban renewal. Sometimes relatives are contacted to move the bodies before the city either paves over the cemetery or moves the bodies to a mass grave somewhere. This happened in many major cities. Both San Francisco and Philadelphia dismantled many old cemeteries (because the land was getting too valuable) and dumped the monuments and grave markers in the local waterways.

Though they seem to be in the limelight right now (with many neighborhood efforts to clean them up and restore them), abandoned graveyards are not a modern issue, a contemporary conundrum. The Hanover photo at top was taken around 1922! By then, the Hanover Street Burial Ground in Philadelphia’s Fish town neighborhood had long been abandoned (it was about 117 years old). (My thanks to Ken Milano for allowing me to use the image from his superb book, Palmer Cemetery and the Historic Burial Grounds of Kensington and Fishtown). Capitola Playground in South Philly and Johnson Cemetery Park (I swear this is really what it’s called, see blog) in Camden Jew Jersey were both originally forgotten cemeteries landscaped over to become neighborhood parks.

Some forsaken cemeteries reside on land that is worthless to real estate developers. These are the ones that languish, and may never get revitalized by any charitable organization. Small ones seem forlorn and pitiful, larger ones can be frightening, like sleeping monsters. The detritus of a civilization, one that doesn’t seem to attach much value to its own history.

As I watch a scavenger outside my kitchen window pick through my trash, I’m taken by its parallel to my interest in abandoned cemeteries. I feel like I’m picking through things other people no longer want. Looking for something that interests me, never really knowing what I might find. The more we educate ourselves about cemeteries, the more can we learn about ourselves – information is preservation. Preserving memory is supposed to be what cemeteries are all about, isn’t it? Well, maybe there are some things we’d just rather not be reminded of.

References and Further Reading:

Missouri Law and Abandoned Private Cemeteries

Ed Snyder has written many Cemetery Traveler blogs about abandoned cemeteries. Here are a few:
New Jersey: Abandoned Cemetery...or just Repurposed?

Philadelphia: How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed and Mt. Moriah Cemetery Rising from the Dead?

Depleted Texas Lakes Expose Ghost Towns, Graves

Twain’s Feast – Searching for America’s Lost Foods, by Andrew Beahrs

Rest in Pieces: Philadelphia's Lost Cemeteries (Tom Keels)
Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries by Tom Keels

Dearly departed − South Philly was once home to at least seven graveyards

The REAL story of the "first" Thanksgiving The National Day of Mourning

Dunmore Cemetery and the Dearly Departed Players

2011-11-20T07:50:00.000-08:00

I guess those of us living in the northeastern part of the U.S. get to enjoy a unique aspect of our cemeteries that people in other parts of the country cannot – the rainbow of colors brought on by leaves changing colors in the fall. (I have this ridiculous notion that you can never see Minnesotan cemeteries because the ground is always covered with snow!). If you happen to pair up the fall foliage extravaganza with a truly beautiful cemetery, the result can be breathtaking. I experienced this at the beginning of November at the Dunmore Cemetery in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.

Dunmore is in the northeastern part of PA, an old coal mining region, two miles north of Scranton (made famous on the TV show “The Office”). The reason I was in Scranton was because I was invited to participate as an artist in Scranton’s First Friday Arts Walk. Most cities have them – once a month, galleries change their exhibits, stay open late, and offer free wine and cheese doodles. Sometimes other businesses get involved, hanging artwork, hosting live bands, etc. You see bookstores, restaurants, bars, ever even churches participating. The good people at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Scranton were my hosts for the evening.

Prior to arriving at the church, I spent a few hours photographing in the Dunmore Cemetery, at the recommendation of the two fine people who were responsible for my being invited − Julie Esty and Wendy Belaski, members of the Dunmore Cemetery’s “Dearly Departed Players” theatrical group. This group offers a stone by stone walk though the history of the residents of the cemetery (sponsored by the Lackawana Historical Society).

Established in 1828, Dunmore Cemetery offers unique and well-preserved ironwork, headstones, statuary, and mausoleums. Across its hilly 35 acres, you'll see a pyramid, a lovely chapel, ornate crypts, even a zinc memorial thrown in for good measure – all blending art with the preservation of memories. Many memorials are quite unique, e.g. the castle-like crypt of the Boies family - with its filigree metalwork inside the entrance. its every bit as extravagant as anything you'd see in Paris' Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Boies Mausoleum, Dunmore Cemetery

Julie Esty's book

Many cemetery companies strive to be what the Dunmore Cemetery is − a destination spot for all sorts of activity. It is a wonderfully landscaped and meticulously attended to Victorian-era sculpture garden. As I drove through and walked around on this gorgeous fall day, I was taken by the fact that there were so many other people here on a Friday afternoon! There were walkers, drivers, visitors tending to the graves of their loved ones, groundskeepers, and so on. Just a bevy of activity – in fact, more people than I’ve ever seen in any cemetery anywhere! The place is obviously a source of great community pride. Its office was immaculate, the sole worker very cordial and helpful. I noticed they were selling copies of Julie Esty’s book, Stories in Stone – Tales of Life from the Dunmore Cemetery, so I purchased a copy, figuring I would later ask her to autograph it. (You can purchase your own copy here.)

As cemeteries revitalize and try to earn more money to stay in business, a major thrust is to get more live people to spend time in them. Why would that matter? Well, if you can offer novel and interesting attractions to people (such that they’ll pay money to come to the cemetery), you can generate income from:

· Historic tours

· Concerts

· Beer tastings (!)

· Special events such as Halloween parties and presentations

But there’s a subtle yet very important reason to attract people to cemeteries, which Julie and Wendy pointed out to me later that evening − the more people who are around, the less likely vandals and thieves will be to damage and steal. As the founder and artistic director of the Dearly Departed Players, Julie Esty has figured out a way to get people into a cemetery (live people, i.e.). Over the course of two Sundays this past October, her two-hour tours of the Dunmore Cemetery drew eight hundred people! She is quite passionate about what her group does in this very popular form of historic preservation (there is actually no fee for the tour).

Photo by Tim Snyder

Early that evening, my brother Tim met me at St. Lukes, where he helped me with the load in and load out. I was given the front room in the church hall − a beautiful space in which to set up my books, photographs, and greeting cards. Inside the hall itself were a half dozen other artists and exhibitors, and a choir performed in the connected church. These people really know how to throw a party! They had a separate room set up with free coffee, cookies, bottles of water, and so on.

Wendy Belaski, Ed Snyder, and Julie Esty

The whole affair was well attended and the visitors were great fun to talk to. Such a warm welcome! New friends and old stopped by, teens, people who were familiar with my work on Facebook, members of the Scranton Photography Club. People had suggestions to visit various local cemeteries, some discussed photographic techniques and camera gear, others asked me the stories behind certain images in my book as I autographed copies for them.

Stained glass from Dunmore mausoleum

Julie Esty and Wendy Belaski (who specializes in the art of mausoleum stained glass), arrived in Victorian hoop dresses and bonnets, as they were exhibiting pieces of funeral history, including post-mortem photographs, mourning clothing, and other artifacts. They’re as much into dead things as I am, so we hit it off well. I appreciate all the tips on nearby cemeteries to visit (especially the run down and nearly abandoned ones) and will definitely head back to Scranton soon. All in all, it was a fabulous visit, and I thank everyone for their hospitality!

References and Further Listening and Reading:

Stories in Stone – Tales of Life from the Dunmore Cemetery, by Julie Snell-Esty, 2010

Hear Julie Esty’s podcast interview on the Dunmore Cemetery (hear what goes into planning a historical cemetery tour!)

The Dunmore Cemetery Tour on Facebook
The Dearly Departed Players on Facebook

Exploding Burial Vaults

2011-11-15T15:25:00.000-08:00

Title got your attention, didn’t it? While I’m sure you’ll agree that “Exploding Burial Vaults” would be a GREAT name for a rock band, you’re probably thinking that I simply made the phrase up as an attention-getter. Nah. I’ll come right out and say that this article is actually, really, about a vault that exploded in a cemetery. Well, to be painfully accurate, it was a receiving vault. And you can go there to see the aftermath, now, years later.

Palmer Cemetery's bier house, built 1872

The Palmer Street Burying Ground is one of the quirkiest cemeteries I’ve ever seen. Named after Anthony Palmer, the founder of Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, the cemetery is in Fishtown, the next neighborhood over, near the Delaware River. Its interesting to note that Kensington was in existence before William Penn's arrival in 1681! Palmer founded Fishtown in 1730, with the cemetery dating back to 1732. The place didn’t appear on my radar until about five years ago, but now I find myself visiting it every few months. It’s a nice quiet little community cemetery, lots of trees, walkways, and gentle hills. Its about a city block in size, very well kept. They still have active burials.

You really wouldn’t know how quirky Palmer Cemetery is unless you lived in the neighborhood, or read up on the place. Or walked through it. Only place I've ever seen a wooden tombstone! Or a bier house (shown above, in Frank Furness architectural style). A bier house is not where the locals go to drink (although Fishtown has some mighty fine drinking establishments) - its a structure which houses a bier - a stand on which a corpse, coffin or casket containing a corpse, is placed to lie in state or to be carried to the grave (Wikipedia). Currently, a cemetery might have a chapel to serve the same purpose.

Also, Palmer is the only cemetery in which I've seen hundreds of iron burial markers just stacked against the fence and propped up against trees - the poor man's grave marker. These things are just jabbed into the ground at the gravesite, but over time, I suppose they get removed and tossed around. I'm sure no one really knows where in the cemetery these people are actually buried.

Difficult to say how many burials there are in Palmer, though the estimate is as high as 50,000. Hardly seems to be enough room for that many people, and the grave markers don't seem to be overly crowded. Well, over the course of 280 years, records of locations get lost, caskets get buried at different depths, and so on.

Quite possibly, the quirkiest thing about Palmer is that its free to be buried there - as long as you're a resident of the neighborhood. From the news article, "The Plot Thickens - Locals are dying to get into this Fishtown cemetery:"

"But even more intriguing than the souls spending eternity here are the unconventional dictates by which this operation is and has always been run. Like most other entitlements, the right to be buried in Palmer comes with strings attached. First, you must be living in Fishtown at the time of your death. Specifically, you must be living within the original boundaries of Fishtown-York Street, Frankford Avenue and the Delaware River."

Also, it's also up to you to have yourself or loved one buried. The official rule is that you walk around the cemetery with a long iron bar. When you find what you think is an open space, you're supposed to ram the bar down into the ground to see if you hit any coffins. If not, the space is yours! I swear to god this is true.

Last winter I happened to be at the Kensington community center for a chili cook-off, when I saw a guy with stacks of books on a table. I went over and found the book not to be a cookbook. Its title? "Palmer Cemetery and the Historic Burial Grounds of Kensington and Fishtown." The fellow signing copies was the author, Ken Milano. I bought one and we chatted a bit, as I was anxious to learn more about the Palmer Burying Ground.

Account of the Exploding Receiving Vault

For the uninitiated, a receiving vault was a common structure in cold-climate cemeteries in the 1800s (when graves were manually dug). If a body had to be interred during the winter months, the building served as temporary storage for bodies, until spring, when the ground thawed. The big marble "Palmer" stone that sits in the grass at the corner of Palmer and Belgrade streets is the only thing left of the receiving vault after it exploded. It originally was the "ornamental frontispiece" on top of the roof (ref).

The vault was erected around 1870, a rather large brick and marble structure built partially underground. Surviving records show that up to ten bodies were stored in it at one time. So how did it come to explode, you might ask? Let's let Ken Milano tell us in his own words (from his book at the top of this article):

"The vault lasted just over a century. In 1975, with a build-up of kerosene fumes along with old rags being stored in the vault, plus the participation of some juvenile delinquents, the vault exploded. The roof caved in and the PALMER stone crashed to the ground. The explosion destroyed the vault. The remains were shoveled into the underground portion of the vault, and it was buried over...the PALMER stone was moved to different places in the cemetery and then finally to its present location."

So those are just a few choice observations I've made regarding the Palmer Street Burying Ground. As I'm sure you'll agree, it has had a long and colorful history, which the neighborhood is actively trying to preserve. Work seems to be constantly in progress as walkways are repaired, old tombstones are patched together, and trees are pruned. Its obviously a source of community pride, and it does my heart good to see it!

References and Further Reading:

Palmer Cemetery and the Historic Burial Grounds of Kensington and Fishtown, by Kenneth W. Milano
Palmer Cemetery - Kensington Burial Ground

Watch the trailer of Ken Milano's documentary on the Palmer Cemetery

Boot Hill Cemetery

2011-11-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

Even if you HAD ever heard of Elkton, Maryland, it was probably for just one thing – the no-fault divorce. While Las Vegas gets all the publicity for such things, in little Elkton, you can get a non-resident divorce, whether or not both spouses agree! If you don’t find yourself in Elkon for some very specific reason, it’s very likely that you’re very simply, lost! I’m referring to an area about ninety miles northeast of Washington D.C., about where the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland cultures collide. I like to think of this vicinity as an extension of the Brandywine area, quite dark and spooky, with all the houses looking like they were painted by Andrew Wyeth.

So I was in Elkon last week, not for a divorce, but to do some cemetery photography. Elkton has a small town center, which radiates out into serious farmland. I’m talking cows here. Of all the cemeteries I mapped out to visit, I had hoped the one named “Boot Hill Cemetery” would be most interesting. While it shares its name of course with the much more famous Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona, in its own way, it did not disappoint.

Boot Hill Cemetery is not the easiest thing to find. Of course, printed-out scraps of paper from Google Maps lying all over the seat of my car may not have been the best plan (my wife keeps insisting on a GPS). Feeling that I must be within spitting distance of the cemetery, I pulled up to a group of good ol’ boys to ask directions (I’m not above that, especially at dusk). They pointed and said, “Right up the hill.” Huh, so Boot Hill Cemetery is actually on a hill. I turned around in the driveway across the street (with the “Parking for Dale Earnhardt Fans Only” sign nailed above the garage) and headed up yonder.

Boot Hill is a rural churchyard cemetery - the small wooden church you see at top of this article (and at the top of the hill) was established in 1858, which appears to be around the date of the oldest graves here. On the church side of the road, the cemetery is rather new – with the oldest graves from the early 1900s. There was a couple standing on the grounds when I pulled my car in, but they left quickly. I saw no other people during my visit. Though I did find this interesting epitaph here, the much more interesting area for me was the opposite side of the road. There, the older graves ranged from the 1850’s to maybe 1945 − a beautiful little place. Like so many other small rural graveyards I found in the area, the gates do not lock. This, fellow cemetery travelers, is always a pleasant find.

Right at the entrance, I was surprised to find three zinc (or white bronze) memorials in a row! My personal best, as a tombstone hunter. Once in a while you'll find one or two of these in an entire cemetery, but three together was an unusual find in this geographic area. (Read more about White Bronze Memorials.)

At the base of the zinc monument in the foreground was the imprint you see below. The Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport CT had an interesting history, which you can read about in my blog link just mentioned. They created all the zinc memorials you see throughout the United States! Yep, they all came from one place. Which is why they all basically look the same. While you could choose from among a variety of funerary symbolism and have custom name imprints made, the structures are basically the same. Which is different from stone carvings you find in cemeteries.

In one of the photos above, you see the words "W. McDevitt, Elkton," engraved in the lower corner of a white marble headstone. Unlike white bronze memorials which were shipped all over the country (between 1870 and 1912), stone carvings are rather unique to the vicinity of the graveyard itself. This is pretty much the case all over. Stone is just way too heavy and fragile to ship. It also explains the great variations in stone type, sculpting and engraving styles, headstone shapes and sizes, even fonts, from one geographic region to another. You tend to see the same style headstones in cemeteries in the same geographic region. Travel fifty miles in either direction, and you're bound to start seeing differences!

Dynasty plot, with headstones engraved on walls

I roamed Boot Hill Cemetery for nearly an hour, making photographs, taking in the ambiance. Quiet. Peaceful. Like the church mice that live in the old building across the street. Lichens grew on the old marble headstones, and on the fifty-year-old seashells bordering some of the burial plots. Why do so many people put seashells on the graves of their loved ones?

Down near the wood line, there was a big old busted wooden pumpkin crate filled with old plywood and broken headstones. What was to become of them? With that to contemplate, I exited Boot Hill Cemetery and drove off into the sunset.

Lichen-covered marble headstone at Boot Hill Cemetery

Further Reading:
White Bronze Memorials blog by Ed Snyder

Halloween Horror

2011-10-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

What reminded me of this incident was the fact that my homeowners’ insurance company suggested I have a “mold remediation” service look at my kitchen ceiling. I had a roof leak during the hurricane that hit Philadelphia in August, 2011. Water came in, the ceiling got wet, and some mold formed. The ceiling needs to be repaired, and any mold remediated. The “mold remediation” service that was suggested by my insurance company is called “SERVPRO.” SERVPRO figures prominently in this very real horror story.

As I waited outside my house a few weeks ago for the familiar light green truck to pull up, I started thinking back to that fateful day in 1997. I was a bit surprised when two men got out of an unmarked car and approached me with meters and clipboards. In retrospect, the company may only send out a green vehicle to do an actual job. Why make the neighbors’ curious with a SERVPRO truck in the neighborhood? Now, if you’re anything like I was in 1997, a SERVPRO truck wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. But in the last ten years, I’ve noticed many more of their trucks around, which can only mean that business is booming. What business might that be, you wonder? Let’s just call it ‘biohazard waste clean-up,’ for now. So every time you see a SERVPRO truck waiting in traffic or parked in front of some house, you can guess what they’re up to.

Back in 1997, I had a previous life. Married to the first wife, we owned a duplex in the suburbs. Had three lovely children. Rented the upstairs half of the house. One hot summer day, I was washing the car in the driveway. Everyone was inside their air-conditioned homes, including two of my kids in my house. What with the noise of the hose and the neighborhood AC units humming along, no one heard the gunshot.

An ambulance pulled in front of my driveway, a bunch of EMTs jumped out and started running toward me up the driveway. Before they got to my car, they turned and ran up the exterior staircase leading up to our second-floor apartment. The story goes that Gary and Gail, boyfriend and girlfriend – our tenants − were lying in bed. Gail was “fooling around” with Gary’s handgun. She supposedly put the barrel in her mouth and said to him, “You don’t think I’d do it?”

She wasn’t dead when they took her away in the ambulance, but died shortly thereafter. The police questioned Gary, and then left. He came down to tell me his version of what happened and told me he was too shaken up to stay in the apartment. He said he’d be staying with his mother for a while. We didn’t see him for several weeks. Thought it was kind of odd that the police didn’t suspect him of any wrongdoing, but hey, they’re the pros. They must have been satisfied with his story.

Other than the death scene itself, one of the most horrifying things is that the guy had a gun. And he and is girlfriend were in my house playing games with it. What if the bullet had gone through the floor into the living space where my children were? What if it went through a window into a neighbor’s house? For years I concerned myself with enforcing the ”no pets “ clause in the lease – never occurred to me that tenants would have guns!

After everyone left, I went upstairs. Blood and brains splattered on the wall, a blood-soaked mattress. Blood on the wall-to-wall carpeting. It all smelled like blood. NOW what? They never show you THIS part on the cop shows on television. Who cleans this up? I spent the better part of a day on the phone calling all the likely resources – police, fire department, ambulance companies, funeral homes. By their responses, you’d swear nothing like this had EVER HAPPENED BEFORE! NO ONE had a clue what to tell me! Having worked in a hospital, they train you to take precautions when handling any bodily fluid spills, since all sorts of diseases can be living in it. So I knew I couldn’t touch anything without the proper tools. Plus it was gross. I called a friend of mine who used to be a firefighter. He suggested calling SERVPRO, a company I’d never heard of.

SERVPRO is who you call when you have “hazardous waste” to clean up. Crime scenes, accidents, anything involving blood and human tissues. It’s a national chain. I’m sure other private companies exist, but good luck finding them!

Ever see the movie “Sunshine Cleaning?” It came out in 2008, and it’s about cleaning up after messy deaths. This is something most people don’t ever have to think about. It’s also something they never address in cop shows on TV or in the movies, at least until “Sunshine Cleaning” came out. The movie is about two young women with dead-end jobs who start “a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service.” It’s a dark comedy, both funny and revolting at the same time. They clean up all sorts of messy death scenes − gun shots victims, gruesome bodies that had been putrefying for months, and on and on. I was mesmerized by the movie, especially at how the women figured out how to do the job, since I had been through the learning process of clean-up myself. But the movie came out years after my own incident - I would’ve given ANYTHING for such information at the time of the gunshot death in my house.

I was certainly appreciative when the SERVPRO guys came the next day in their white Tyvek zipper suits and space helmets. They bagged up the mattress and tore out the rug. I watched them carry it all down the outside stairs, wondering where they would take it all. They cleaned the walls and disinfected the hardwood floor under the rug (blood had seeped through the rug). They did a great job - as they say in their advertisements, like it never happened. Well, sort of. It was also surprisingly affordable. I remember thinking, “They could have charged me TEN TIMES this amount and I would’ve had to pay it.”

Gary came back a few weeks later and announced that he would be moving in with his mother. Okay with me. Was wondering how I was going to get him out of there. After he left, I had to go through the process of finding a new tenant. As people came to look at the place, I hoped none of the neighbors would pull them aside and whisper, “Hey, you know somebody died up there?” Killing all my chances of ever renting the place again. But that didn’t happen. Got new people and they never found out, to my knowledge. Time passes.

Fast forward two years later, when I spot an item in the local paper, showing a photo of Gary! The police had arrested him for murder. Did somebody have second thoughts about the shooting at my house? Did they nail him for killing his girlfriend? Well, no. It seems that at some point, Gary moved in with a couple the next town over, then shot and killed them both. To my knowledge, they never re-opened the case of his “suicide” girlfriend.

Last Words:

"Gary" and "Gail" are not their real names.
Link to SERVPRO, in the event, God forbid, you ever need them.
View trailer of the movie, “Sunshine Cleaning”

Beginning to Die - The Strange State of Mt. Moriah Cemetery

2011-10-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Things are beginning to die once again at Mount Moriah Cemetery, in southwest Philadelphia. It is October, when the grounds unveil their new fall wardrobe. Which is essentially the opposite of what the living do as it gets colder − a paring down, a baring-all in comparison to its heavily clothed leafy summer atire. It’s really the only time of the year to see this enormous Victorian cemetery in all its run-down glory. No camouflage to mask its sores, no briars and poison ivy left to prohibit access to its most forbidden corners.

Volunteers pruning trees

The volunteer clean-up crews have died out for the season as well. As the heavy weed growth has been curtailed by Mother Nature, there is no need for whacking, mowing, and raking. Though an enormous amount of maintenance and restoration can keep volunteers busy all winter, the idea may to avoid burning out the willing help.

As one of the registered volunteers, I received this letter last week from the Chief of Staff at the Philadelphia Managing Director’s Office. I thought it would be of interest to all my readers to see what goes on behind the scenes of keeping a cemetery from dying. Maintaining any cemetery as a viable business is not an easy thing to do, which is no wonder so many succumb to abandonment. Read on, you may learn a bit about the biz. You’ll also see how a cemetery can be managed quite unscrupulously.

(Photographs by Ed Snyder)

All - I have been asked by a number of stakeholders to recap what's happened around Mt. Moriah Cemetery. That overview is below. As you'll see, this situation is complicated and there's no easy answers. However, I'm confident that by working together, we'll continue to make progress.

If you have additional questions, please let me know.

Brian Abernathy, Chief of Staff
Managing Director's Office
Suite 1430 Municipal Services Building
1401 John F. Kennedy Blvd.
Philadelphia, PA 19102
T: (215) 686-2134
C: (267) 455-4444

Mt. Moriah Cemetery – An Overview

Background and History

Mt. Moriah Cemetery is an historic burial ground incorporated by an Act of the State Legislature in 1855. While reports indicate that the Cemetery is 380 acres, a review of real estate records indicates that it is approximately 200 acres. Philadelphia and Yeadon share approximately equal shares of the Cemetery.

Since its founding, the Cemetery has been governed and cared for by the Mt. Moriah Cemetery Association. In 2004, the last known member of that Association, Horatio C. Jones, Jr., passed away. From 2004 until March 2011, the Cemetery appears to have been operated by an employee of the Association.

The State still recognizes the Mt. Moriah Cemetery Association as the legal owner and operator of the Cemetery; however, because the last known board member has passed away, no individual exists to act on the Association’s behalf. As such, no responsible party is present to assist with maintenance, burials, disinterments or the placement of headstones.

Sometime after the mid-1950s, the Association established a Perpetual Care Fund to assist in the long-term maintenance of the grounds. The Fund would deposit a percentage of the cost of the burial lot into a separate account. The interest earned on the account was to be spent to maintain the grounds and the principal of the account was not to be spent.

In March, the City was made aware through news reports and citizen phone calls that Mt. Moriah had ended its business operations. To our knowledge, no one from the Association informed the State, the City or the funeral directors that had worked with the cemetery of its intent to close.

Since first hearing of the closure, the City has led a working group consisting of representatives of Yeadon, Council President Verna, Councilwoman Blackwell, Councilman Jones, Representative Waters and Senator Williams.

Governing Authorities

Cemetery operations are governed by state law and regulated by the Commonwealth’s Real Estate Commission. However, the Commission’s authority is limited to licensing and ensuring that proper payments are made to the Perpetual Care Fund. The City itself has no specific oversight of cemetery operations although the City’s Property Maintenance Code does apply in the maintenance of the buildings and grounds not occupied by existing burial lots.

Burned-out car hung up on gravestone

There is no state or local agency directly charged with regulatory oversight of cemetery maintenance or the physical conditions of burial lots; however, the failure to properly maintain the cemetery may constitute a misdemeanor under the State’s Burial Grounds Law and other criminal violations may have occurred.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General has received complaints alleging consumer fraud relating to the purchase of burial plots that may no longer be available. The Attorney General cannot confirm or deny that an investigation is ongoing; meanwhile, other state agencies may also be conducting their own, independent investigations.

Maintenance and Records

Cemetery forest

The Cemetery has been poorly maintained for decades with many of its historic sections overgrown and wooded. Since its closure, the portions of the Cemetery that had previously been maintained by the Association have deteriorated. Because business operations have ceased at the Cemetery, there is no operator to coordinate and consent to the placement of new headstones, and, regardless of whether or not burial plots were previously purchased, no operator to coordinate and consent to new burials on the property.

Mount Moriah Gatehouse, Kingsessing Avenue

Because of the condition of the property and the deterioration of the historic gatehouse, which is on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, the City instituted a Code Enforcement complaint against the Association. The City named the Association and Lydia Jones – the widow of the last known board member of the Association - as defendants. Lydia Jones appeared through an attorney and claimed that she has no substantive relationship to the Cemetery.

The City’s action against Mount Moriah revealed that the Association that owns and operates the cemetery has not had a board of directors or any other person authorized to act on behalf of the Association since 2004 when the last board member of the Association, Horatio Jones, died.

Due to overgrowth of foliage, mausoleums can only be seen in winter.

Since the Association is a non-stock entity there are no shareholders to push for the election of new board members. While it is still a validly existing entity in the eyes of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there are no individuals that are duly authorized to run and operate the business.

As such, it is unlikely that the Court will hold any person, in their individual capacity, responsible for the property maintenance violations.

Through this lawsuit, the City also learned that the balances of the bank accounts owned by the Association are too low to effectively operate the Cemetery. This issue has been reported to the Real Estate Commission, the Attorney General and District Attorney.

Graffitied mausoleum

As part of the City’s court action, the Court allowed the City access to the property to abate the most egregious conditions. The City’s vacant lot program was able to cut the grass on a significant portion of the property at a significant cost. This effort culminated in a community event organized in larger part by three community organizations: the Friends of Mt. Moriah, Save a Grave for Mt. Moriah and Build a Fence for Mt. Moriah. The Association has been billed and a lien will be placed on the property for the full amount.

These community groups have committed to provide best efforts to maintain the property for the immediate future and several additional community clean-ups are scheduled. Estimates for annual maintenance of the entire property are approximately $500,000.

Yeadon side, Cobbs Creek Pkwy.

Because of the resources required to maintain the property, Yeadon has not been able to take the same action as Philadelphia; however, they are moving forward with property violations and intend to lien the property.

Because of the imminent threat of damage to the historical records contained in the Association’s office, the Court authorized the City to remove and secure the historic records. The records are currently being stored by Iron Mountain, a records storage company. The City’s Consumer Affairs Advocate Lance Haver is the point-of-contact for family members inquiring about their loved ones.

Ongoing Operations – The Long-term Issue

The future operations of the cemetery are complex and must account for a number of issues.

Considerations include:

The Cemetery is one of the few cemeteries in the City known to accept Muslim burials.

The Cemetery is one of two in the vicinity known to accept “communal” burials – burials where three bodies share one grave and are a less expensive option for many families.

The Cemetery charged approximately $1500 per burial – a much more affordable option than other cemeteries, which charge up to $5000 per plot.

Approximately 60% of Philadelphia’s portion of the cemetery and perhaps more of Yeadon’s portion – including the most important historical sites - is overgrown and inaccessible to the public.

While approximately 80,000 dead are buried in the Cemetery, by most reports, there is still significant space for additional burials.

As previously mentioned, the perpetual care fund – a fund established by law in the 1950s to guarantee ongoing cemetery maintenance into which 10% of the plot cost is to be deposited – and the general operating account do not have balances sufficient to maintain the property.

Several reports have indicated that burials may have not occurred properly (i.e. within a drainage area) and there are unconfirmed reports that multiple burials have occurred in single (not communal) plots.

Because of the questions surrounding the Cemetery’s operations, whatever entity takes control of the Cemetery in the future must be protected from the Association’s past liability.

The Cemetery contains several historical burials including soldiers of the Revolutionary, Spanish-American, Civil and both World Wars.

Notable individuals buried at the Cemetery include Betsy Ross (thought to be moved in the mid-1970s); George Connell, Philadelphia’s first Mayor; Senator Israel Wilson Durham, a former President of the Phillies; John Whitehead, singer, songwriter and producer; and Henry Jones, fugitive slave turned successful restaurant owner that won a landmark Supreme Court decision to allow his burial at the cemetery.

Several churches moved their cemeteries to Mt. Moriah over the years. Notable sections include: First Baptist Church, St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, St. George’s Methodist Church and others. Several Masonic Lodges also have specific sections and the Beverly National Cemetery maintains veterans’ sections.

The Cemetery may be a node for the East Coast Greenway.

Because of these historical and environmental attributes, funds may be available through historic preservation, recreation and environmental grants.

Because the Cemetery is an important resource to several racial, religious and socioeconomic stakeholders, it is important to guarantee stability of its future operations.

Today, the Mount Moriah Cemetery is owned by a defunct non-profit corporation and the Cemetery cannot continue its business operations unless and until the ownership issue is addressed. In order to obtain a new owner for the property court action is likely required.

Yeadon and Philadelphia are currently negotiating the development of a new not-for-profit organization to take ownership of the property. Because of the complexity of the issues and in order to insure a similar situation does not occur in the future, ongoing municipal involvement is important. While the organization would be led by the municipal governments, the organization’s board would be as diverse as those interested in the Cemetery and include representatives of different races, religions and backgrounds.

Funding

There are several opportunities to fund the new organization and improve the Cemetery’s current conditions. Historic preservation grants, storm water management fees, funding as a portion of the East Coast greenway, environmental protection grants and donations from stakeholders like the various churches, masons and veterans’ organizations are all potential funding sources. Cemetery operations could be funded by new burials. Once the site is abated, most death care industry experts believe the cemetery may be self-sustaining.

Cemetery Exploring: Scranton PA and its Environs

2011-10-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

It seems I’ll be allowed to go on being Ed Snyder for a while longer. Just got home from having surgery on my inner ear and am waiting for the power headaches to kick in. Pass the Darvocet, please. As I write this, I’m flying higher than angels.

When you go under general anesthesia, you’re never a hundred percent sure you’ll wake up, you know? (That is, unless you checked the appropriate box on the “Advanced Directive” form.) But hey, aren’t these the best conditions under which to write a cemetery blog? I certainly can’t go exploring in a local graveyard– my equilibrium is off and I might fall over a cliff or something. Boneyards around here are like that. Of the literally scores of them in the Philadelphia area, many are not kept up that well. There are the ones with sunken graves, open crypts, tombstones spilling into the river, the ones with dealers and hookers and burned out cars, voodoo offerings and long rusty saws and knives hidden in weeds. As for this last one, I’m not referring to the self-defense weaponry with which I typically arm myself when I explore such places. I’m referring to the giant carving knife I found stuck inside a child’s grave monument (shown above) in an abandoned Philadelphia cemetery. Intertwined with the memorial ’s faded and soggy stuffed animals was a melon vine. So I’m sure some homeless guy was using the knife only for good. The only thing worse than abandoned cemeteries is abandoned people.

Too bad you don’t dream under anesthesia. You have no brain capacity for that − they basically kill you, while keeping you alive. Thanks to Tommy for that comforting thought, and for driving me to the hospital this morn − Whoops – I was listing to port for a moment there, felt a bit of my brains leaking out my ear. Better right myself and prop up with some pillows. There. Any “Distance Reiki” practitioners out there willing to send some positive energy my way?

I need to recuperate well, you see, and not lose any white matter. The Cemetery Traveler will be heading up to Scranton, PA in a few weeks and he needs all his faculties. He also plans to stop talking in the third person, as it gets on his nerves. I was offered a spot at St. Luke’s Church as an exhibitor during Scranton’s First Friday Art Walk for November. I will be showing my photography (prints framed and unframed), greeting cards, and books – all for sale. As it will be in a church, I may need to go easy with my usual tongue-in-cheek banner ads, like “Death Images – Just in Time for Xmas!”

I don’t have a lot of work from the Scranton area (even though I grew up around there), but I do intend to show some of the images sprinkled throughout this article from the nearby towns of Wilkes-Barre and associated environs. In fact, my signature image, “Folded Hands” (which you see at the beginning of this article, on my Facebook page, business cards, and the cover of my “Stone Angels” book) was made in the Exeter Cemetery, across the Susquehanna River from Wilkes-Barre. I shot it some years ago around seven o’clock one misty morning, roughly twenty minutes after I left a sleeping woman in bed to zip back to Philadelphia. As I closed her locked front door behind me, I realized I left four pounds of fresh Polish kielbasa in her freezer. Damn!

Slovak Cemetery, Exeter, PA

Occasionally I post images on the Facebook page, “Cemetery Iron,” like this gate from the Exeter cemetery. (“Cintorin” is Slovak for ‘cemetery.’) The wrought iron fencing reminds me that for the next few months, all my food will have a metallic taste. Side-effect of the stapedctomy (ear surgery). My doting wife Jill just allowed me to devour a hot dog, which tasted much like one would expect a piece of cemetery iron to taste, were it served up on a bun. Maybe later, I’ll try a metallic Nutella sandwich.

Oww! Sorry − just tore off an errant ECG electrode they left on my right leg. Funny how when they were monitoring my vital signs, they complimented me on how “normal” I was! Hah! Me! Normal! If only they were to read this blog! Anyway, I’m glad I had the bionic ear installed (my hearing acuity will be so amazing I’ll be able to hear what people are thinking! Imagine that.). A benefit of hearing well is that when I do shows now and meet people face-to-face, I’ll actually be able to hear what you’re saying (instead of faking it, as I’ve been doing. No that’s not true – I’ve learned to read lips. Again, not true. I can kind of hear, but I do sometimes allow my imagination to fill in the gaps. Much like how I write, since my memory is less than perfect. I’ve had considerable hearing loss since I was twenty years old, when I spent way too much time next to the PA speakers at several KISS concerts. I’ve also come to suspect that my parents may have dropped me on the head as a small child.

So anyway, while in Scranton for the Art Event, I intend to spend some time in the nearby Dunmore Cemetery, as recommended by my Facebook Friend,Wendy Conrad Belaski, who is a member of The Dearly Departed Players (who give tours of the cemetery while reenacting the personalities buried there).

Angel, Hollenback Cemetery

Another favorite graveyard of mine in the area is the Hollenback Cemetery, which is across the street from the Wilkes-Barre General Hospital (click here for a view of its rather unique entryway). My Dad died there in 2004 (the hospital, not the cemetery). Hollenback is a quaint old hilly Victorian cemetery along the river, which is where I shot this angel. As for the cemetery where my Dad‘s ashes reside, that’s an unassuming little back-mountain graveyard in an area north of Wilkes-Barre that is so “out there” it’s just called the “Back Mountain.” I don’t believe there’s even a town associated with it, just a sand pit.

"Damaged Woman with Dog"

Here’s a photo a little statue near my Dad’s grave. Looks like the woman had some surgery done to her head. Which prompts me to break here and apologize since I, your favorite content provider, seem to be jumping around a bit, ah, content-wise. It’s the drugs. But hey, if it worked for Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, etc.), should work for me, right? Gee, I wonder if Microsoft Word has a plug-in for correcting dyslexic text? (Try to say that quickly three times! .. or just ONCE, actually…) It’s taking me much longer than usual to type this article since the effector neurons sending impulses from my brain to my fingers seem to be regularly misfiring. Have to keep going back to make corrections. Maybe I’ll lighten up on the next load of painnkilerz.

"Old Man"

You look at pictures like this “Old Man” (double-exposed and cross-processed Ektachrome) from the Hollenback Cemetery, and you wonder if this guy had anything to live for when he reached the stage in his life when the sculpture was made. Me, I certainly do have a lot to live for and to be thankful for – a wonderful wife, four lovely children. Oh, and the ability to go on being Ed Snyder for a while longer, until my peep-hole into the world is finally closed, as Kurt Vonnegut would say (or said, rather, as he’s dead). Vonnugut’s work, by the way, is one of the few things you can read when you’re drugged up and loopy, and still have it all make sense! This last image is for him:

Epitaph, Hollenback Cemetery, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Indian Summer (Graves)

2011-10-12T06:31:00.000-07:00

I don't even know if its politically correct to call it "Indian Summer" anymore! (Do kids play 'Cowboys and Native Americans' these days?) So here it is, Columbus Day, almost mid-October, and its 85 degrees in Philadelphia! The tomato plants in my garden are still putting out, yet the osage oranges are beginning to fall in St. Peter's Churchyard cemetery! (Osage oranges, or 'hedge apples' are baseball-sized citrus-y pounders that do a bit of damage when they fall out of the trees.)

Columbus Memorial, South Phill

I started thinking about Indians today, which is what Christopher Columbus called them when he hit the shores of the Americas, thinking he had landed in India (get it, Indie-ans...?). Columbus carried with him a passport from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, written in Latin and dispatching him "toward the regions of India" on their behalf (ref). My friend Tom asked me today if I knew how you're supposed to celebrate Columbus Day. He said, "Walk into somebody's home and say, 'I live here now.'"

Osage orange

As there are no Indian graves nearby for me to photograph on this Indian Summer day, I did the next best thing. I went to the St. Peter's Churchyard cemetery in Philadelphia (3rd and Pine Streets) and photographed the "Tribal Chieftains 1793" sign you see above.

St. Peter's Church, est. 1791

I had originally read about the story in Tom Keel's book, Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries, and was kind of surprised to actually see more evidence of it on a sign in the graveyard itself. In our continued effort to take land away from the Native Americans, the late 1700s saw pioneering expansion of the land west of the Ohio River. Several Indian tribes from the area were, naturally, against it.

Excerpt from sign in st. Peter's Cemetery

In the summer of 1793, U.S. President George Washington invited all the tribal chiefs from the region to Philadelphia (then the capital of the country) to discuss a treaty and "negotiate." In the meantime, Washington had Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne assemble a highly trained army to fight the area's Indians and take the land. In an amazing coincidence, during Washington's "peace" negotiations, all eight chiefs contracted smallpox, died, and were buried in unmarked graves in St. Peter's churchyard. Without their leaders, all the tribes were easily defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers a few months later in 1794. Gee, that's pretty sickening, don't you think? I don't believe I'll call it Indian Summer anymore.

Here's how the sign in St. Peter's Cemetery tells the story:

"In January of 1793, a delegation of tribal chieftains from what are now Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan arrived in Philadelphia, the U.S. capital. The Indians had been invited by President George Washington to a Peace Council to resolve boundary disputes in the newly created Northwest Territory. No agreement was reached at this time and war followed. The Indians were defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794." (ref.)

Godd ol' USAir flying over 'our' amber waves of grain.

References and Further Readings:

Does "Indian" derive from Columbus's description of Native Americans?
St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia, PA
Find A Grave site related to the seven Indian Chiefs in St. Peter's Cemetery smallpox
Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries, by Tom Keels

The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (text)

The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (book)

Cemetery Rain

2011-10-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the bed at night playing my guitar, all is peaceful as I watch the rain against the window. The colors continually shift into new Impressionistic patterns as the rain and glass refract the glare from street lights, traffic lights, and cars. The colors have a liquid flow not unlike the lava lamp my childhood dentist had in his waiting room.

With all this tranquility, I naturally think about cemetery rain. Great name for a song, huh? "Cemetery Rain."

More specifically, about how no one ever visits a cemetery when it’s raining. I used to be one of those people. But a few days later, I find myself driving around Cathedral Cemetery (est. 1876) in New Castle County, Delaware, hopping out of my car here and there to grab a few shots with an umbrella over my head. When the rain gets heavier, I simply shoot out the car window. With the exception of the occasional funeral, I’m alone in a cemetery when it’s raining. It’s a very quiet place. As Cathedral Cemetery’s website says, “when our temporal world requires refuge, our cemeteries offer solace.”

Being here brings to mind the old Velvet Underground song, “Who Loves the Sun:”

"Who loves the rain
Who cares that it makes flowers
Who cares that it makes showers
Since you broke my heart
Who loves the sun
Who cares that it is shining
Who cares what it does
Since you broke my heart."

When you play guitar while looking out at the rain, you find yourself playing to the rhythm of the weather, the rain gently tapping against the window pane. Which is not unlike visiting a cemetery in the rain – you play to the rhythm of the weather. You’d be surprised at the new things you see, once you get yourself past the inconvenience of it all − strange dampness forming on headstones, water dripping off plant leaves, marble monuments glistening. The odd patterns that formed on this mausoleum above as the moisture soaked into the granite made me realize that this stoic material is not impervious to change.

I wouldn’t have even noticed this flat-to-the-ground headstone if it wasn’t for the wet, red artificial flower resting forlornly at its base. A lot of people assume headstones just fall over, and that is why they’re flush with the ground. Who would’ve known they do this on purpose in Scotland? In Glasgow, any rickety headstone is placed flat for safety reasons. Unfortunately, a playing child was once killed when an old tombstone fell on him, prompting the practice.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but you really can’t take a bad photograph during a cemetery rain. You would think it would be severely limiting, given the conditions. Sure you may not be able to control every aspect of the photographs you make, but nature may help you create something you would never have thought possible. Like playing guitar during a rain, it alters your mood. When I photograph cemeteries under less than ideal weather conditions, it’s very much like allowing the rain and color patterns on my window to influence my playing. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but it always adds a new creative dimension that helps me leave the temporal world. When I can’t quite coax what I feel out of the instrument, however, I take solace in the words of guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke, who said, “A guitar sounds good even if you drop it on the floor.”

Children's Graves and Sperm Donors

2011-10-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

The package of Oreo cookies I bought last week (September 25, 2011) had a stamp on it that said the cookies were okay to eat until January 2012. I love fake food! Food that doesn’t go bad for three months! Food that refuses to die a natural death. So by mixing in bad chemicals (as writer Kurt Vonegut would say) with the cookie matter, Nabisco extends the shelf life of the product from (let’s guess) one week to twelve! Too bad they can’t mix up a bad chemical cocktail for humans, huh? Extend our lives by twelve times the normal. Why must immortality be so elusive?

The Oreos got me thinking about mortality, but two other things happened that day that REALLY got me thinking about mortality. First, I found out a neighbor backed his truck accidentally over another neighbor, killing him. Second, this show came on the telly called “Sperm Donor.”

The reality TV show Sperm Donor is about a guy who (indirectly) fathered seventy children via donation of his sperm - and, get this - he wants to meet them all! Despite this grossly egocentric desire for immortality, he’s trying to convince his fiancé to marry him. I happen to know two of the children he helped conceive – and they look like him!

Obviously, desire exists on the part of some people to procreate, when they physiologically cannot. It's great that we have the technology. Children’s gravestones from the 1800s remind us of the preciousness of life.

Back before vaccinations and prenatal care were all the rage, infant mortality was much higher than it is today. Couples back then didn’t have large families due to lack of birth control – they had large families because they knew many of the children would die young. Today we’ll use dramatic medical intervention (at a cost of perhaps a million dollars) to save one baby, while down the hall another medical team will be aborting a healthy fetus. What’s up with us? Is it really just about survival of the fittest?

They say that in a hundred years, there will be all new people, implying that all the troublemakers (and hence, all our troubles) will be gone. Obviously, that won’t happen – there will just be new troublemakers. WE will be gone, but what sort of legacy will we have left behind? If only someone were looking at the big picture (like the guy in the photo below), and telling us, “No, don’t do that – it doesn’t make sense in the long run,” or maybe, “Go ahead and eat that entire package of Oreos – tomorrow someone’s going to run you over with a truck and you’ll be dead anyway.”

Looking at the Big Picture

Further Viewing:

(If you can stomach this freak show)
Sperm Donor, broadcast on The Style Network

Vaccine History and Achievements (The National Network for Immunization Information)

And for the contrarians out there: Vaccines Did Not Save Us – 2 Centuries of Official Statistics

Flowers of Evil

2011-09-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

Once in a while I discover the reason I’ve taken a photograph. This doesn’t happen often. In fact, there was a space of ten years between the time I made this photograph at left and “discovered” its raison d’être. I cannot say where I made the original image (memory being imperfect, note-taking, even less so), but I did at some point apply some photo dye to a paper print. Perhaps this was ill-advised. Regardless, I like the colorized image.

Titling my work is not one of my strong points (my oldest daughter, Julie, used to make fun of my titles). So, any help I can get is appreciated. Not being above plagiarism, I’ve stolen words and phrases from books, magazines, song lyrics − ultimately, from other people. When I came upon the collection of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, it was like I found the Grail!

I found this lovely volume while browsing the fine book section at Long in the Tooth, a fabulous used/new-book-and-music shop in Philadelphia. The couple who own it cater to a rather specialized clientele – in other words, they have cool stuff that I like. I’d heard of Baudelaire, but had no idea what his work was about. Thumbing through the book for a minute made me realize it had to be mine. Not only is this 1857 collection of poetry fabulously intense reading (forget Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn that you had to read in high school!), but for my photographic images, I can pretty much open the book anywhere and grab a fine title line! A casual thumbing rewards you with such gems as:

"Under a stricken sky"
"The twin goddesses, Force and Grace"
"Trembling like a soul in pain"

I’ve sprinkled this article with some of my original images, graced with titles borrowed from Les Fleurs du mal. For the kind of cemetery photography that I do, Baudelaire’s poetry offers descriptive candy. Merely opening the book and reading any line will serve quite nicely. But that one line can easily suck you in. Before you know it, goths, horror fans, and cemetery travelers alike may find themselves reading the entire poem, then the one after that, and so on.

"The black hearses of my dreams"

Baudelaire was a French poet of the mid-nineteenth century. Bitter. Hated people, critics especially. Widely recognized as an innovator of French literature (Wikipedia), his work influenced an entire generation of poets, including Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell). Baudelaire had great difficulty getting his work past the censors of the day, mainly because his writing is violent, brave, vulgar (for the time), and highly sexual – all of which make Flowers of Evil a collection of exquisite poetry that is oh so worth reading! (And oh so worth plagiarizing.)

Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's evocation of the dark side of the imagination, which influenced the sinister seductiveness of his own work. “These themes and influences play a predominant role in Baudelaire's 1857 collection of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and death with an ideal universe of happiness”(ref).

"A smile not ever, neither do I weep"

Baudelaire and his publisher were both prosecuted at the time, as Flowers of Evil was viewed as “an insult to public decency."As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined and some of his poems from the work were suppressed (the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949)(Wikipedia). Which is all very surprising to me, as the work is certainly not as horrible, hideous, and gruesome as the work of another French writer, the Marquis deSade, who was imprisoned and sent to an insane asylum as a reward for his work. Ah, the power of the written word – and the possible consequences when you grant people freedom of speech.

The French Novel

My only experience with the French novel up to the point of my discovery of Baudelaire was a Humanities course I took in college (1978!), called “The French Novel.” I had heard it was easy – read six novels and give an oral presentation at the end of the semester. The course description was accompanied by the two most beautiful words in the English language: “No tests.” A cake course, I thought.

Between reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola’s Nana, and a few other classics, I had to come up with a topic for my 45-minute speech. Early on, I learned to pick up on clues left by people as to their likes and dislikes (a skill that has allowed me to be nuts-on with buying Christmas presents over the years). The professor who taught the French Novel course would mention the work of the Marquis deSade every now and then, which was enough for me to pick up on the fact that he was a fan. And, not knowing anything about deSade's writing, my nineteen-year-old curiosity was piqued.

"The tomb is hungry"

My presentation would be on deSade's work. After procuring some of his books (not easy, as its basically all violent porn), I devised a presentation. At the end of the semester, I brought a couple of the books to class, with the intention of not showing them to anyone. During my speech, I referred to his Gothic fiction in vague terms, never once quoting deSade. It was a small audience, maybe six guys and twelve girls. As I spoke, I could tell they were getting more and more nervous, yet curious about deSade’s writing. I kept saying things like, “You shouldn’t read this if you have a weak stomach,” and “Really, this is the most horrible thing you’ll ever seen in print. Please don't open the book unless you really want to.”

I’d considered it experiential learning, in a way. People loosely throw around statements like, “That teacher is such a sadist! He gives SO much homework!” Perhaps we shouldn’t use the term so lightly?

"The sacred holocaust of your first flowers"

By the middle of my presentation, I’d worked them to a fever pitch. The flowers of their curiosity were opened and in full bloom, ready for my Evil. I picked up one of the books, Justine, and held it out to a student, with the suggestion that they may open it and read a few words if they dare, then pass it along. As I continued speaking, I totally ignored their reactions. Someone would receive the book, hesitantly open it, read for a couple seconds, maybe half a minute, close it, and pass it on. Every face was shocked. In the span of fifteen minutes, three young women burst into tears, got up and fled the room. I wasn't actually prepared for that, but I soldiered on. The professor loved my delivery and I got an “A” for the course. Over a year later, I actually overheard a couple of freshmen discussing the particular professor who taught the French Novel course. One of them said, “It’s a tough course. I heard only one person ever got an “A.”

When you learn more about something (like cemeteries, for instance), you typically become more comfortable with the idea. Not so with deSade's work. And maybe not so with Baudelaire's, either. So why read such dark literature? Other than providing witty titles for artwork, what other purpose can it serve? Filmaker/author John Waters points out a possible benefit to all of us: "No one ever committed a crime while reading a book!"

Links and Further Reading:

Long in the Tooth on MySpace

Marquis deSade

The writings of the Marquis deSade are not for the faint of heart, so I purposely avoided linking to any of them. However, if I've aroused your curiosity, please hunt for them yourself - but you've been warned.

Books by the Marquis deSade:

Justine

The 120 Days of Sodom

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man

Then there's the (2000) movie about deSade, Quills, starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet and Joaquin Phoenix (not for the squeamish).

Old Camden Cemetery - Chickens, Prostitutes, and Civil War Vets

2011-09-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

Just a short posting about an even shorter visit to the Old Camden Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey yesterday. I’ve driven past this small and forlorn weed-covered graveyard a number of times, usually as more of a landmark as I tried to find other, larger local cemeteries. But I was on my way home from work on a sunny September afternoon, and I thought I’d better check this place out before daylight savings ends.

So I cut off I-295 and descended into the depths of Camden. I drove under the PATCO High Speed Line railroad bridge near Mt. Ephraim Avenue and Mt. Vernon streets (a block from the cemetery), and slowed down to dodge potholes and hookers. I get the smile and wave from one of the latter. Ah, Camden. I pull up in front of the inner-city cemetery as ambulances rush by and a commuter train thunders overhead. Another woman is walking up the sidewalk toward me. I get my camera gear out of the trunk and head into the abandoned graveyard where she is sure not to follow. I think there must be an ordinance in Camden that prohibits a prostitute from propositioning you on consecrated ground. So she just leans on the fence and calls out to me. Responding politely in the negative, I went about photographing tombstones and she strolled away. This has happened to me before at other Camden cemeteries. Everyone needs a livelihood and I know this is an economically depressed area, but it’s still a bit weird.

White marble headstones cocked at awkward angles litter the place. Large bags of trash had been unceremoniously tossed in the thigh-high weeds just inside the entrance (there is a fence, but no gate). Luckily I’m not in the habit of opening such trash bags – I was just reading up on the history of Old Camden Cemetery, and I came across this little gem posted by a visitor:

"Adding a touch of the macabre are collections of plastic grocery bags filled with headless, mutilated chickens in full feather. At the center of one cluster of graves near a large tree was a two-foot-wide hole dug nearly three feet deep -- for reasons one can only guess at." (ref)

WELL now! Had I read this BEFORE walking the grounds, I may have … not!

It’s no surprise that this city cemetery is in such deplorable condition. I mean, Camden can’t even afford much of a police force – the Guardian Angels volunteered to supplement it last year (“Guardian Angels take to NJ streets as cops dwindle”). So when you couple this with the fact that Camden has a 20% unemployment rate and is the “second most dangerous city in America,” you begin to see why no money is spent on the upkeep of its historic graveyards.

Old Camden Cemetery is, well, old. The burial ground was established in 1801, with burials ceasing in 1940. The place has become progressively more derelict over the past seventy years. It hasn’t necessarily been abandoned, just uncared for. Though Camden’s Department of Public Works is responsible for the cemetery, it’s obvious that nothing is done for its upkeep. In a city that cannot even afford to employ an adequate number of firefighters, teachers, or police, how could you expect money to be spent on an old cemetery?

Praying Mantis

As I walked the grounds, people would pass by outside the fence every few minutes and look curiously at me in the high weeds. Next time I’ll carry a shovel over my shoulder – that’ll REALLY give ‘em something to ponder! The weeds were up to my elbows in many places, and I attempted to photograph a six-inch-long female praying mantis for a while (happy not to be a male mantis - a female will usually eat the male's head while mating). A mantis will usually crawl up your arm if offered, but this one was a bit skittish (as was I, truthfully, about losing sight of my car). I followed the little critter around a tombstone, wondering if the ground below was piled with headless mantis bodies, when I realized that a big cemetery tree was now between me and my car. Stepping around it, I saw a couple guys eying its open windows. At that point, my cell phone rang and they moved along.

Headstone base

I was shocked to later read that this (approximately) twenty acre cemetery has seen 11,000 burials! If you walk around the place, you’d guess there were only about 100 grave markers. Oddly, though, I stepped on many concealed (by weeds) headstone BASES. What happened to the headstones? In the article, “Dead and Forgotten in Old Camden Cemetery,” authors Hoag & Sandy Levins state, “In years past, when a marker was knocked from its base, the errant marker was thrown into the back of a dump truck and dumped into the Delaware River up near the Farragut Yacht Club in East Camden.”

"United States Colored Troops"

I guess I’m not surprised by this as Philadelphia did the same thing with an entire cemetery in 1958 (dumping 20,000 monuments into the Delaware)! (See my blog on the demise of Monument Cemetery). I look out over this weed field, and see but a few tall monuments, some rusty cemetery fence, and one lonely granite memorial, the sad scene punctuated here and there by brightly-colored wildflowers. And speaking of colored, I came upon this stone (at left), a marker for the grave of a Union Army Civil War veteran who was a member of the "U.S.C.T." -- the 19th-century military acronym for "United States Colored Troops." The existence of Private David Painter’s grave is reason enough for the preservation of Old Camden Cemetery. I quote from the article, “Dead and Forgotten in Old Camden Cemetery:”

"Like the very existence of the unit in which Painter served, the existence of his grave in this cemetery commemorates a pivotal point of cultural change in America. The large-scale recruitment, training and arming of free men of color and former slaves as a cohesive African-American battlefield force marked a watershed in both the racial and military history of the United States. Similarly, the distinguished service of U.S.C.T. veterans caused some communities to rethink their racially peculiar burial prohibitions. For instance, Pvt. Painter was laid to rest in a cemetery that, prior to the Civil War, legally barred the interment of blacks or the transfer of plot ownership from a white person to a black person." - Hoag & Sandy Levins

Washed Out Graves

2011-09-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

Washed out graves caused by flood in Lawton, PA

I spent the last two days watching the news about the flooding in NEPA, Northeast Pennsylvania. I have kind of a morbid interest in it, like looking at an automobile accident. Not because I like to see people in pain, but because I lived through the Flood of 1972 in NEPA’s Wyoming Valley, caused by Hurricane Agnes.

I live in Philadelphia now, a geographic region not prone to natural disasters. Until recently, that is. I used to like that about Philly. Unfortunately, two weeks ago (the last week of August, 2011), we not only had an earthquake (5.8 in intensity), but a freakin’ hurricane in the same week! Jesus Christ on a toasted bagel! My kitchen ceiling leaks now and I am no longer a fan of the rain gods.

Flood waters gushing past levee (ref.)

Given a choice, however, I’d rather have ceiling leaks than live through another flood. I mean, imagine this scene at right (from a few days ago) being your home town. Led Zeppelin's song, "When the Levee Breaks" takes on a whole new meaning. You wake up to the television showing evacuation routes out of your city. I watch these poor people (and animals) in Wilkes-Barre (near where I grew up with my parents, brother, and sister) packing up their possessions and lashing them to the roofs of their cars – it brings back, well, a flood of memories. We had water up to within one step of the second floor of our house. We lost everything in the basement and on the first floor. My dad and I paddled a rowboat out to our house when the water was highest. Scraping the metal boat bottom on the roofs of cars is a sound I still remember.

My friend George, who lived a few blocks away, got it just as bad. He reminded me recently that the worst thing about having your house under water is the flood mud that’s left after the water recedes. River flood water is not clear water, it becomes muddy and brown as it rips up everything in its path. Look at the water in the photo above – its BROWN! It also stinks like fish. The mud dried on everything. I still have some in a little 35mm film container. People tried to hose out their TVs and other appliances, tried to salvage them, to no avail. Flooded cars got sold on the other side of the country, to the unwitting and the unlucky.

My Mom said to me last night – and this gave me chills as I hadn’t thought about it for decades – “Remember we had to kick down the warped doors to get into our house after the water went down...?”

Tomorrow, volunteers are needed to clean up the abandoned Mt. Moriah Cemetery in West Philly. At the same time they’re looking for volunteers to sandbag the dikes along the Susquehanna River north of here. I remember sandbagging on top of a twenty-foot-high dike in front of my grandmother’s house. It looked for all the world like her house would get washed away when the water came over the dike. Instead, it ripped through the dike a couple miles up river, gutting a cemetery in its wake. There were stories about the National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers collecting bodies and removing caskets that had jammed themselves onto the front porches of houses.

I wrote about walking through the devastated Forty-Fort Cemetery in a blog last year ("Cemetery Flood"), and the horrors and stench that greeted you if you were crazy enough to crawl under the boarded-up fence after the waters receded. (They shored up the levee at this point on the river last week.) Seeing these photos yesterday of exposed coffins and vaults in the Snyder−Rush Cemetery in Lawton, PA (photo at top of this article) brought back some of those memories. You think when an area is flooded, the water comes in, then goes away. Not so. There’s a lot of force involved. Cemeteries aren’t necessarily safe just because the bodies are underground.

Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown

In 2006, I visited Georgetown’s (Washington, D.C.) Oak Hill Cemetery, an incredibly picturesque and beautifully landscaped Victorian cemetery. It was late spring and had been raining a lot. I checked in at the gatehouse and the caretaker, a little old lady, welcomed me. As I strolled down the wet slate walkway (that you see at left), she came out and yelled, “Be careful! The walk is slippery, but stay on it! The grass is even more slippery and you could fall into a sunken grave!”

As I made my photographic way down the winding paths under the trees, I heard water below. Curious, I continued down the lovely terraced switchbacks until I could see Rock Creek down there through the trees. The landscaping is extraordinary here – the hills and dales provide a greater amount of acreage than you expect. What you see from the road (‘R’ Street) gives you the impression that Oak Hill is a rather small cemetery. However, the majority of its 22 acres is tree-covered and slopes down and away from the road toward Rock Creek.

Reaching the bottom of the cemetery, I was a bit shocked to see the muddy waters of the swollen creek licking at the bases of the monuments. The swift current carried tree limbs and other debris past the foothills of the cemetery. Everything was damp and mossy down there and I was overwhelmed with a very uneasy feeling, a feeling that I still get when I look at the photos I made that day (the ones you see here). I climbed back up the hill toward daylight.

I emerged from the dark woods and clambered up onto the base of a large marble obelisk to photograph its angels, when almost immediately, a police helicopter appeared directly overhead! (oddly, this is not the first time this has happened to me! (see my blog posting, "Bessie Smith's Grave.") I froze, and realized that the streets outside the cemetery were crawling with cops; roadblocks were set up on 29^th and R Streets where I was parked. Hey, whatever manhunt is going on here in the land of the living sure beats the creepy flooded graves down by the creek. So I just eased on out of there and headed for the nearest alehouse. I often wonder if anything ever gets washed away down there, off into the Potomac River. Who would know? Like the bodies – skeletons in old-time clothes – that got washed down the Susquehanna River and into the Delaware Bay in 1972. That river is like a running, open wound, a wound that never heals.

View other Flood News:

Volunteers Needed for Sandbagging
Shoring Up the Levee in Forty-Fort, PA
Flood photos at WNEP-TV's Facebook site
Susquehanna River Flooding
Hurricane Agnes: Here We Go Again
Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Levees Under Extreme Stress after Record Crest
Cemetery Flood posting on The Cemetery Traveler
Bessie Smith's Grave posting on The Cemetery Traveler
Photo credit for top photo of washed out graves: ConservativeHideout.com
Book: A Portrait of Agnes