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One of the reasons this post has languished unpublished for so long is because I honestly thought I'd already posted it, and was surprised, while working on something else, to see it in my Drafts folder.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.