Woodlawn Cemetery
The Charles Osborn mausoleum was a design of McKim Mead & White.
Audio Slide Show: Inside Woodlawn Cemetary
If there is a Fifth Avenue of the dead, it is probably the ensemble of 1,313 private family mausoleums around the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Like the mansions their occupants knew in life, these buildings hold artistic treasures intended to be seen by the very privileged. And the very few.
But over the last year, the crypt doors were nudged ever so slightly ajar, in the interest of conservation and security, to permit the first photographic inventory of Woodlawn's little masterpieces. "It's just unbelievable,'' said Susan Olsen, executive director of the Friends of the Woodlawn Cemetery. "These are really significant works of art.''
It is no secret that great architects, artisans and artists worked at Woodlawn to ensure that their clients' prominence extended from metropolis to necropolis. But the scope of the collection - stained glass, decorative mosaics, busts, statues, bas-reliefs, vases, candelabra - was not known until now.
The discoveries ranged from the glorious to the poignant, like a parrot resting in peace with Dr. Clark W. Dunlop, who died in 1908, and his wife, Eliza, who died in 1932.
Lee Sandstead, who teaches art history at Montclair State University in New Jersey, took more than 10,000 digital photographs. The inventory was financed by a $5,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and $10,000 raised by the Friends group.
Though 60 percent of the mausoleums are endowed, the money is not typically enough for proper protection and preservation. Many builders assumed servants would take care of things in perpetuity.
Cemetery officials hope to use the inventory to persuade present-day families to involve themselves more in the care of the mausoleums. They are also scrutinizing the records to learn which structures can be opened to the public.
"These people didn't build these spaces for no one to come see them,'' Ms. Olsen said.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20031025_WOODLAWN/index.html
Elegy in a City Graveyard
By JANET MASLIN
NEW YORK TIMES, July 8, 2004
Fred Goodman
When Fred Goodman decided to write a book about a 400-acre graveyard in the Bronx, he took on an unavoidable mission. He was going to have to dig things up.
After all, Woodlawn Cemetery does not automatically yield an easy premise. As the final resting place of both Herman Melville and the 700-pound rapper Big Pun, it is diverse in the extreme. No unifying ambience or ethos explains the place, and not even the Ozymandias angle gives Mr. Goodman (author of "The Mansion on the Hill," a blistering book about the music business) much to work with. Yes, the more than 350,000 New Yorkers interred at Woodlawn are all dead. But the glorious achievements of some have been long forgotten, while those of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Robert Moses live on.
At first Mr. Goodman approaches his subject in a roundabout manner. Quite literally: he tools around it on a bicycle, which seems as much an athletic ploy as a literary one. In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, and with the prospect of his own death prompting a midlife crisis, Mr. Goodman begins contemplating both Woodlawn and mortality. "Who hasn't worried about fading away?" he asks, looking at the grandest mausoleums. "Who wouldn't use money to try and beat death, to spray-paint his tag on the passing subway car of history?"
This is the point at which the book's research component kicks in. It is the time, for instance, to learn that Woodlawn is where the inventor of FM radio is buried. But "The Secret City" is a book that favors odd contortions. After some straightforward background about Woodlawn and its history, Mr. Goodman abruptly summons the specter of Melville and joins him to witness the events of September 11, 2001. ("I finally watch with him as first one and then the other building crumbles.")
"Listen: I have an act of faith to perform," Mr. Goodman announces to a New York in mourning. "I want to tell you my story about our cemeteries, the big one up in the Bronx and the other one that we're walking around in. It goes like this."
So here comes Walt Whitman, frayed trouser cuffs and all, "nodding vigorously" and exclaiming "Yes!" in Mr. Goodman's eagerly reanimated version. Now "The Secret City" becomes a string of desperate dramatizations, scenes that wake Woodlawn's residents from their eternal slumber and plunge them into dialogue of dubious provenance. When Whitman meets the phrenologists and publishers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, who will go on to publish "Leaves of Grass," Mr. Goodman even dreams up some ersatz excitable Whitman. Upon making a business deal with the publishers, this book's Whitman declares, "Professor, you make a man's organ of Acquisitiveness positively throb with delight!"
Otherwise, delight over Mr. Goodman's embroideries is liable to be in short supply. After learning that Whitman is "not partial to strawberries," the reader is next confronted with sacks of rats. The book imagines the rats in combat, "swarming around the dog in a terrified riot of hair and teeth," as Mr. Goodman makes his bumpy segue to the story of Woodlawn's Henry Bergh, crusader against cruelty to animals and founder of the S.P.C.A. As is often the case here, Mr. Goodman points out that there is a good, straightforward biography of his subject (in this case a book called "Angel in Top Hat," by Zulma Steele) that is difficult if not impossible to find.
Lurid description of the swill being fed to cows gives way to the presidential privilege of Chester A. Arthur: now the book has moved on to Austin Corbin, its closest approximation of Ozymandias' broken statue in the desert. In his heyday, while trying to sway President Arthur to advance his own developing schemes, Corbin was a man winning big at a real-life game of Monopoly. He bought railroad lines on Long Island and put up Coney Island hotels, envisioning a grand empire. Part of his dream was that Montauk harbor be dredged; part was that Jews be kept out of Coney Island. The man's entire game plan added up to one more stop on the Woodlawn tour.
The book's other re-enactments, interspersed with the author's bicycle expeditions, feature John Purroy Mitchel, the young New York mayor trying to maintain calm in the midst of a polio epidemic; Francis Garvan, instrumental in the Palmer anti-Communist raids after World War I; and Countee Cullen, uptown poet during a period of great creative excitement. (" `You mean during the Harlem Renaissance?' Cullen intoned the words with mock gravity. `That's what they're calling it now, right?' ")
A maverick Congressman (Vito Marcantonio), an aviator (Ruth Nichols) and the sculptor (Attilio Piccirilli) whose 300,000 pound Lincoln Memorial had to be created in sections ("Signore President Lincoln might have held the Union together, but we had to break him apart") provide further opportunities for Mr. Goodman to ramble. What's the connection? Even he admits how arbitrary it becomes. "Like a satisfied tourist whose fond memories of a recent package tour to Rome now cause him to stop and read all the newspaper stories with Italian datelines he once ignored," he writes, "my antennae have become tuned to any vibrations emanating from that well-fertilized patch of Bronx earth."
But at the end of the day - the part of life that "The Secret City" obsessively addresses - this place is dead. It's still dead when this book's strenuous efforts are over.
THE SECRET CITY
Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York
By Fred Goodman
Illustrated. 385 pages. Broadway Books. $26.