Flashback: Black Friday 2014

One of the reasons this post has languished unpublished for so long is because I honestly thought I'd already posted it, and was surprised, while working on something else, to see it in my Drafts folder.  AND THEN I told it to post on Black Friday this year and it failed to do so, which I only just noticed.  Better late than never, I suppose.

I spent a few days in Connecticut the week of Thanksgiving.  A day or two before the holiday itself one of the aunts mentioned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in the town of the same name (possibly while discussing the TV show purportedly set there), and on Friday we made the short drive to New York to see some graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

There are actually two cemeteries adjacent to each other in Sleepy Hollow.  One is the graveyard of the Dutch Reformed Church, with 18th- and 19th-century interments, and the other is the cemetery that shares the town's name.  The church itself was closed when we arrived.  We bypassed the Old Dutch Church's graveyard to drive through the other cemetery, stopping the car to jump in and out as necessary.  This was a welcome way to visit, because the cemetery is large and hilly, and because, being the end of November, it was fairly cold out.

Located in the Hudson Valley with views of the river, Sleepy Hollow has its fair share of famous residents.  There are Rockefellers, Astors, Chryslers, and Helmsleys, as well as several people involved in newspaper publishing in the city.  The Helmsley mausoleum features a stained glass window of the New York skyline, centered on the family's building.  I was disappointed by the entirely unremarkable Chrysler mausoleum; I'd expected something more akin to the Chrysler Building--not the chrome, really, but the Art Deco style of it--but it was plain, with a set of columns at the front and no windows whatsoever.  And not a fin in sight.  What a missed opportunity.

Where the Chryslers disappointed, though, other less well-known but still wealthy people had better taste.  The two mausoleums (mausolea?) I liked best were the Archbolds' and the Lewis'.  The latter, pictured at right, was a stone chapel with chunky architectural elements; something about it seems very Scottish, though I'm not sure why.  It also has a lovely stained glass roundel.  With its round shape, smooth dome, and mosaics, the Archbold tomb seemed to be modeled after Italian Byzantine churches.  That style, to me, makes more sense for Christian(ish) American cemeteries than does Egyptian Revival.

I was surprised to find on the map that Andrew Carnegie was buried in Sleepy Hollow.  The Scottish-born businessman was probably the greatest patron of libraries and education in the modern age.  His site is fairly simple; there's a plaque with information about his philanthropy nearby, and stones inscribed with his name and his wife's in front of a Celtic cross.  At the base of the cross were an American flag and a Scottish saltire.  Perhaps in appreciation for his exceptional generosity, people had left coins on the stone bearing Carnegie's name; since both Carnegie's name day and St Andrew's Day were coming up, I added the shiniest penny I had as my present.

In the context of the cemetery, the most famous grave is that of Washington Irving.  The author's tomb is among several of his relatives', and the plot, along with Irving's home and the Old Dutch Church, is a national historic landmark.  Irving's grave is slightly larger than the surrounding ones, and is set off by a pair of American flags.  Someone had also decorated it for the season with pumpkins and yellow flowers. 

We also saw, among the graves of the common folk, a stone with our name on it.  It wasn't anyone we knew, but it's somewhat unusual to come across people with our surname who aren't related to us.

Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla is huge.  The office has multiple brochures, including general maps and tours focusing on trees or architecture.  One large section, Sharon Gardens, is all Jewish graves; we drove through but didn't spend much time there.  In Kensico proper there's a big section full of tombstones inscribed with Chinese characters, and some really nice Art Nouveau monuments.

There are fewer industrialists and old-money type people here than in Sleepy Hollow, but more people from the entertainment world.  Sergei Rachmaninoff and his wife Natalie have a nice little plot surrounding by bushes, though the large Orthodox cross that is the center of the plot only features the composer's name.  A popular grave for visitors is Lou Gehrig's, if the baseballs and glove left there are any indication.  I think what looks like the headstone is actually a mini-columbarium; a pair of bronze doors with a keyhole are set into the stone.  I liked seeing Tommy Dorsey's grave, decorated with a trombone and the opening bars of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You."  But by far the one I was most pleased to see was the grave of Danny Kaye and his wife Sylvia Fine Kaye.  Their monument is a stone bench; a bronze plaque with symbols of their work and interests, including a grand piano and UNICEF's logo, is set into the back.  Danny's name is on the band of a chef's hat on the left side of the plaque, and Sylvia's is on the bottom of a sheet of music on the right.  Much like Katharine Hepburn's at Cedar Hill, the Dorseys', the Gehrigs', and the Kayes' memorials are all fairly understated for people as famous as they were; that kind of humility seems to have fallen by the wayside.

As our time at Kensico was coming to an end we saw a group of graves most intriguingly carved.  The Kirby family included a naval engineer (Frank), a Phi Bete (Russell), and a PhD/author/scholar/musicologist/magician (Frank II).  All of them have stylish and possibly arcane decorations on their headstones.  While I wish Mary's had listed her accomplishments as her husband's and sons' stones had, I did appreciate the squirrel and flowers on hers.

Though I was happy to see Danny Kaye and Tommy Dorsey, on the whole I liked visiting Sleepy Hollow more than Kensico.  The former felt much cozier, and I think on the whole the graves were more interesting there, in part because they were older.  That age also meant that the graveyard felt more organic and less planned.

Boston Burying Grounds

Some of Massachusetts' most famous burying grounds prove once again that there's a good reason stereotypical old graveyards in films look the way they do (though I can't for the life of me find a picture of one of said films that illustrates my point).

Until last week the weather had been pleasant, with temperatures into the 70s at the end of last week and bright, clear skies.  Acutely aware that this trend would not last--and indeed it has not--I wanted to take advantage of it, and of the driving that I'd be doing anyway.  So I did some plotting and made a plan to visit three of Boston's burying grounds two Mondays ago, a number that increased by one in the course of the day.

Transportation tip: If you're taking the T, aboveground stops may not have machines where you can buy tickets.  You can buy them on the train, but the machine can't give change, so don't use too big a bill, or you may end up with unused fares.

Below is a general map of my route, starting from the North T station and ending at the Boylston Street station (both on the green line).  I mapped it out because I really just wanted to see how far I'd walked; it felt like more than two and a quarter miles, but the number of lunges I did while taking pictures certainly contributed to that feeling.  By vaguely following the Freedom Trail and my recollections of last spring's visit with Mom's class, it was easy enough to find the way from the North End to the more central sites.

Copp's Hill
For some reason I seem to refuse to believe that any East Coast city has hills.  I'm not entirely sure why this is, particularly when the word itself is in the names of places; but I did indeed have to charge up a bit of a steep one to reach the first stop.  Despite Mom saying something about their proximity, I was also surprised to see that Copp's Hill is about a block from Old North Church, with the entrance to the church visible from the cemetery gate on Hull Street.  In fact, a school group came through while I was there.

Copp's Hill is the largest of the cemeteries I visited.  The half of the burying ground furthest from the gate is hilly, revealing a view of the bay.  There is also a square section along Hull Street that is set a few steps down from the rest of the cemetery; it seems to have later burials than the rest, and certainly fewer.  Of the four described here, Copp's Hill and Central burying grounds are the two that allow you to walk among the stones--Copp's Hill does have paved paths, but no barriers or markers asking you to keep to the walkways.  I appreciated this, but unfortunately, so did the family that let their children sit on the (restored) tomb of the Mather family.

King's Chapel

King's Chapel is the oldest burying ground in the city.  It's adjacent to the church of the same name, and on the small side.  Like the Granary, King's Chapel is bordered on three sides by buildings that keep most of it in shadow.  Some of the stones are nearly entirely sunk into the ground.  Several members of the Winthrop family are buried there, including the first governor of the colony.  There is also a grave dedicated to William Dawes, Paul Revere's less well known partner in midnight riding, though whether or not he's actually there is uncertain.

Granary

Interment place of Crispus Attucks and the other Boston Massacre victims, Benjamin Franklin's parents, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, John Otis, and John Hancock, the Granary is arguably the most significant of the city's burying grounds.  I felt satisfied by being able to answer a man when he asked if I knew where Crispus Attucks was buried, though I certainly didn't explain the location very eloquently.

When I arrived, there were dozens of bags of leaves arrayed near the entrance, and before I left more were added by a team of hardworking groundskeepers.  I suppose it's necessary to remove the leaves, since the burying ground is such a prominent tourist destination, and since it would be a hazard if they were to spill out into the busy city street outside; but I missed the autumnal scenery.  And, while I appreciate the work that the crew was doing to clear up, I also wondered what they thought of the tourists wandering around while they were working.

Central
Unsurprisingly, the batteries in my camera died shortly after I arrived.  Central is on the edge of Boston Common, just near the Boylston T station, and is squirrel paradise.  I don't know if I've ever seen so many squirrels in one place.  Now the question is would I rather be a cat in an Italian cemetery, or a squirrel in a Massachusetts one?

Between my camera being kaput and the approach of the time I'd appointed for my return to campus, I didn't spend much time at Central.  It has quite an odd feature, though.  Part of the cemetery is as you see in the picture, but off to the right there is a large ditch that surrounds what I assume must be mausoleums, though they're covered with grass.  That area is where Washington portraitist Gilbert Stuart is buried; I didn't get to see him on this trip, but I did get a glimpse during the infamous Forced March through Boston Common of 2008.