Grave Humor

Just because I spend too much time wandering around cemeteries doesn't mean I've lost my sense of humor.  To the contrary, I think one needs a sense of humor in order to pursue this hobby; if you let the locations and inscriptions get under your skin too much, you're apt to go looking for a mausoleum with an empty niche to crawl into.

With that said, one of my main objectives is to seek out the obscure and bizarre:  the eighteenth-century sandstones with winged skulls and death's heads, inscriptions that outline how the deceased ceased, and most of all, strange names.

I began exploring cemeteries almost as soon as I got my first SLR camera, back in 1982.  There was one a few miles from my house, the resting place of a branch of my family, with lots of interesting markers, especially this one, which caught my eye, and never let go:

St. Mary Star of the Sea, Cedarhurst, NY

More recently I was walking through one of three cemeteries in Bethpage, New York, near the famous 'Bethpage Black' golf course.  It was there that I came upon this, which is destined to become the image I will always visualize when I hear the word 'birthstone':

 

That same day, in one of the adjacent cemeteries, I found this, which aptly fits the definition of 'what lies beneath':

Powell Cemetery, Bethpage New York

For the final entry today, there's this stone from the Cedar Grove cemetery in Patchogue, NY, taken in July of 1991:

The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists the first known usage of the term 'birdbrain' in 1933; sadly they do not provide the example.  A search through my OED reveals no listing for the word.  Given that he lived for seventeen years after its coining, I hope old Bird was able to take a joke.

BB-39 - USS Arizona Memorial

Pearl Harbor has been an American Naval Base since the 1890's, and was the site of the infamous Japanese surprise attack on the morning of December 7, 1941.  As well as forcing the United States into World War II, this battle also resulted in the greatest loss of life on a single ship in American Naval history.

BB-39, the USS Arizona, had its keel laid in March of 1914 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and was launched from there on June 19, 1915.  She was commissioned on October 16, 1916.  After a month-long shakedown cruise for some final work, the battleship was assigned to its homeport of Norfolk, Virginia.  Though built in time for WWI, due to the shortage of coal in Great Britain, her patrols were confined to the east coast of the US.

After the war, Arizona conducted fleet maneuvers in the Caribbean until her transfer to the Pacific in September, 1921.  Based just south of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California, she operated there for eight years, performing maneuvers and Marine training exercises, then returned to Norfolk for a complete modernization, an overhaul which was finished in 1931.  After taking President Hoover on an inspection tour of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, she returned to San Pedro.

In 1940, just before she was transferred to the Hawaiian command, the battleship was overhauled once more, this time at the Puget Sound Navy Yard.  Arizona finally arrived at Pearl Harbor in February, 1941.

Though the ships logs were lost, it is known that she entered Pearl Harbor and moored at her quay for the last time on Saturday, December 6, 1941.

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Arizona Memorial - January 28, 1996

It's a quiet ride on the launch from the visitor center to the memorial.  You hear the motor, and the water rushing past, but human voices become muted as the boat nears the brilliant white sloping structure.  Disembarking at the dock the only sounds are from the park rangers directing the crowd; inside almost everyone speaks in a whisper.  Even the children are silent.

Opened in 1962, the concrete memorial seems to float astride the sunken battleship. It actually stands on piers, and no part of the building touches the ship. It's an open-air structure, with seven large openings on either wall, and another seven in the ceiling above.  Seven openings to signify the seventh of December.  There is a large opening in the floor near the far end, you can lean on the railing and look down at the wreck.

 

Memorial Wall - 1,117 Sailors and Marines

  

Dominating the far end of the memorial is the marble wall with an alphabetical list of the 1,177 sailors and marines who died aboard the ship that December morning, most of whom remain entombed in the waters below your feet.

The marble and engraving are the same as you'll find in any United States National Cemetery, which lends an air of solemn familiarity to the place.  But although this is not a national cemetery, it is a war grave, and is administered as such by the United States Navy as an active site. 

 

Gun Turret Number Three

An active war grave, you may be thinking, more than seventy years after the battle? Well, yes, as the few survivors of the attack have been allowed to have their ashes interred on the ship in a niche within the Number Four turret, which is located below the waterline, and behind the Number Three turret, pictured above.  To date, a little over two dozen urns have been placed.  Men who served on the ship before the attack, but not assigned to it at the time, may have their ashes scattered in the waters over it.

A full list of the current interments and scatterings, as well as more information about the ship and memorial, can be found here. 

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But Wait, There's More!

November 7, 2011

The Friends Meeting House is on Old Jericho Turnpike in Jericho.  Easily overlooked, next to a multi-story professional building on the edge of a commercial area.  The cemetery behind it is hidden by trees from Route 25, and about ten feet above the roadway, so you'd never see it driving by.  I noticed it on my map, and seeing it was near a few others, decided to see what was there.  Walking in I knew right away there wasn't anything to interest me: all the markers were identical, two and a half-foot high dark granite stones, all mostly 20th century burials.  The meeting house dated from the 1700's, but any stones from that period must have weathered away long ago.  Worse, all the stones faced north, away from the light, and this type of granite is hard enough to read even in good light.

I wandered about anyway, after all, I was here, but frankly, this was a boring place. But there's always something...  

Now, I've been to dozens of cemeteries here on the Island, and I've seen every sort of phrasing possible carved on gravestones; from tortured verse on the passing of a child (Lynbrook - "Ah, no more can we list to her laughter/nor see the fond light in her eye/Like a flower she blossomed and faded/T'was God's will that the dear one must die.") to extended descriptions of the manner of death (a 19th century man in Commack, 'by a waggon loaded with hay running over his brest') to the diseases that killed them (Southampton, 'died of the Smallpox', late 18th century).  I've learned that 18th century wives were often referred to as 'consorts', and then 'relicts' a hundred years later.  I've seen huge stones with space for a half-dozen names yet having but one, often that of a young woman, carved off to one side, with the rest of the stone blank.  I've even seen a gravestone for a man who survived a shipwreck.

So here's to Andrew Dott, Jr., the newest addition to my list of odd stones, for the past forty-two years beckoning passersby to 'See Other Side' and read his wife's curious verse:

Quaker Cemetery, Jericho, N.Y.

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Hallowe'en with Harry

October 31, 2011

I've been to see the gravesite of Harry Houdini many times over the years at the now semi-abandoned Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, and even went there last year on Hallowe'en, but I never had the chance, until today, to see his bust atop the center pillar of the memorial.


The bust was originally a part of the site, which was built by Houdini (born Erich Weiss) in 1916 to honor his parents, who are memorialized in the carvings on the left (mother Cecelia 1841-1913) and right (father Mayer 1829-1892) sides of the half-circle bench. (These were cut from the original stela the parents were buried under and incorporated into this new one.)  They, along with his maternal grandmother and four of his brothers, are buried with Harry in the forecourt.  The stories I hear was that the original bust was was stolen so often that the family finally gave up on replacing it, and a reproduction was created by the Society of American Magicians and placed here only for the memorial service they hold every year on the anniversary of Houdini's October 31st, 1926 death.


This particular bust, I learned, was created by the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, after a years-long fundraising effort, and installed here, somewhat covertly, on this past September 27.  You can read their account of it here. 

The Weiss Family Gravesite - October 2011

But last year, when my sister and I came by, there was no bust, in fact, the cemetery gates were locked.  We got onto the grounds through the adjacent Hungarian Cemetery. (The Machpelah gatehouse has been abandoned for several years now.)  I was here again this past August, and while the gates were open, the grounds were somewhat overgrown in places.  While not as far gone as the Bayside/Acacia Cemetery in southern Queens, or the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia, it could, sadly, be only a matter of time.

Grave Marker.  Note the small padlock in the letter 'O'

 
 
Houdini died in Detroit at the age of 52; he was born 26 years before the turn of the century and died 26 years after.  His wife died in Needles, California, in 1943.  That date remains uncarved on their stone for the simple reason that she isn't buried here.  Bess, as she was known, was born and raised a Catholic, and her family would not allow her to be buried in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery.  Or the Orthodox Jewish Machpelah Cemetery  would not allow a shiksa to be buried there.  Both stories are out there, take your pick.  Bess can be found in the Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

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Addendum:  I received an email this morning from George Schindler, the dean of the Society of American Magicians, informing me that this year's Broken Wand ceremony will be held at 1:26 PM on the anniversary of Houdini's death, based on the Hebrew calendar (23rd of Cheshvan, 5687), which this year falls on November 20.  If you're interested in attending let me know, and I'll send you directions to the cemetery and parking information (Machpelah Cemetery has no parking lot).
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Christmas Road Trip: Part One

Christmas Day dawned with high, thin clouds.  It wasn't too cold, high thirties, so, with family obligations obliged the night before, I pointed the car east for a day on the road.

Christmas, New Year's and Thanksgiving Day seem to be the best time for a drive on Long Island; all the idiots are home.  Except for the one in the Hummer, who came up from behind me in the HOV lane on the Long Island Expressway (I'd had the lane to myself when I got on) and hung twenty feet behind me as we went 75 MPH toward Riverhead.  He wisely left at the first exit lane, which is good.  If he hadn't, I was going to simply take my foot off the gas until I hit 55 and he gave me some space.

The ride was uneventful after that, and I made it to my first destination, The Big Duck, by around eleven in the morning.  The sun was shining off and on through the clouds, but the overall scene was pretty flat.  I hadn't seen the duck done up for the holidays at this, its original location, before.  When it sat at the entrance to Sears-Bellows park I made a nice shot that later became a holiday card.

Since I can't do a road trip without including a cemetery or two, I made sure to have a good one along the way.  Green River Cemetery in Springs is the final stop for a dozen or so prominent names from the twentith century.  I had only one in mind, a painter who lies under a giant rock, who overturned his convertible one drunken night less than half a mile away, killing himself and another passenger.

To judge from the dates on the surrounding stones, Jackson Pollack had this hillock all to himself until the early nineties.

The main point of this trip was to spend some time wandering around Camp Hero State Park, a former Army, then later Air Force base located about a thousand yards west of the lighthouse.

If you've ever driven along Montauk Highway as it rolls through the scrub pine east of Amagansett you've seen the radar tower pictured above off in the distance.  The most prominent feature of the site, the  SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) AN/FPS-35 antenna was probably the last major structure there, built in 1958 to detect long-range bombers during the Cold War.

The road in the picture leads to the locked gate of a fence surrounding the tower and some other buildings.  This part of the park is closed; the military deactivated the radar in 1980, and all operations here ceased by 1984. 

This sign was curious; usually when I encounter these signs they don't give such specific indications of the danger involved. I followed the fence from here until I reached the expected gaping hole about a hundred feet along.  (There's always a break in the fencing around these places.)

Winter is a good time to explore abandoned sites like this, when the undergrowth has dried up and thinned out, all the better to watch for the inevitable sinkholes and open manholes.  The one here, on the right, looked to be a service box for an underground electrical and communications network, judging from the conduits I could see.  I couldn't see very much, though, since it was filled with water of an indeterminate depth.  Nestled as it was, surrounded by what would be in the summer tall, thick grass, I began to suspect the 'falling objects' that the sign warned visitors of would be the visitors themselves.

I can't find any stats online about the height of the concrete tower, and I wish there were something in the shot above to indicate scale, so all I can do is tell you that this thing is immense.  The dish itself, according to what I found, is 126 feet wide and 38 feet high.  Using that as a guide, I'm figuring the base is at least twelve to fourteen stories tall.  Other than what seem to be vents, there aren't any windows, and only one door, opened, on the north side.  (No, I didn't go in.  I'm curious, but I'm not stupid.)  

Wandering about under this thing was a little humbling in a way: the mass of the concrete, its sheer height, the 40 ton dish atop it all, which, by the way, moves freely in the wind, combine for a very interesting experience.    

Then I saw this.  At the base of the tower.  And I thought back to the 'falling objects' sign.  Now I invite you to look again at the dish in the picture above, or in the earlier one.  Do you see that triangular nick on the upper right corner?

Now that sign makes sense... 

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Happy Birthday, Harry

It's a good thing Harry Chapin and Billy Joel never got into the habit of carpooling, or worse, following one another anywhere, or there might be two graves up on this hill. Billy somehow survives to late middle age though, while poor Harry never got past exit 40 on the Long Island Expressway one rainy summer afternoon in 1981 on his way to a concert in Eisenhower Park. I remember hearing the initial traffic reports about the accident on WLIR-FM, before we knew who it involved.

(It seems now that my memories of first hearing many of the major events of the late 1970's and early 1980's involved staring at a radio speaker. Elvis, Bing Crosby, Reagan, the Pope, the USA Olympic hockey team, the Pope. All staring at a radio speaker.)

Nassau County eventually named the theater in the park after Harry, though the Interstate Highway Commission opted to keep the designation of 'Exit 40E - Jericho Tnpke' for the highway ramp.

Harry spends his days and nights now just below the top of the highest point in Huntington Rural Cemetery, on the quiet side of the hill, insulated from the from the sound of traffic on Route 110. The hills on this part of the island form the Harbor Hill Moraine; detritus left behind by the retreating glaciers from the last ice age. Appropriately, a glacial boulder serves as his headstone, embraced by box evergreen bushes and flanked by two young pines.

The stone is covered by other stones, dozens of rocks and pebbles, left by visitors, some with painted messages, and keys, and coins. Lots of coins, and I'm sure many of the visitors to this windswept hill pull a few hits off a joint as well, before dropping off some quarters and dimes, beckoning Harry to keep the change.

December 2, 2009

Harry Chapin would have turned 67 years old today.

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Hilltop Markers

December 1, 2009

Huntington Rural Cemetery spreads across several hillsides along the west side of Route 110, New York Avenue, in this village on Long Island's North Shore. Names familiar to the town's commercial signs and its very streets dot the landscape, giving the grounds an air of coincidental oddness.

I think this may be the only zinc marker in this place, although I haven't covered all of the grounds. It's over seven feet tall, and was raised to the memory of Hester King, the young wife of J.M. King, who died in 1886 at the age of 33.

To those of you visiting via Taphophile Tragics, a short explanation about zinc markers is in order, as they are, to the best of my knowledge, unique to the United States.

These are hollow, metal grave markers that were manufactured by a company called Monumental Bronze, located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the east coast of the U.S.  They were only made for 37 years, between 1875 and 1912, and all of them came from the single foundry.  They were marketed up and down the east coast and midwest United States by sales representatives, in many designs that could be chosen from catalogs. (This was long before the Truth-in-Advertising era; though cast in zinc, they were called 'white bronze' for enhanced sales cachet.  Color-wise, they're actually closer to a light gray, or gunmetal blue.)


There were numerous advantages to using these markers: they were durable (though sometimes prone to metal fatigue in the taller examples), the bas-relief lettering is perfectly legible to this day, and convenient (the monuments had removable panels for the names of the deceased; unused panels had symbolic embossing until the space was needed).  And being made of 99% pure zinc, they wouldn't rust, and naturally repelled organic growths, so no vines or moss would ever cling to their surface.

More information about these unusual markers can be found here.
   
This was shot with the InfraRebel, using the 17-40L @ f4 -17mm - 1/4000 sec - ISO 400
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The Past is a Curious Place...

Patchogue - October 5, 2009

Shipwrecks were fairly common off the south shore of Long Island during the nineteenth century, so it's not unusual to come across several headstones of victims of the same event.

The three-masted schooner Louis V. Place was wrecked off the Great South Bay during a horrific nor'easter in February of 1895. It took two days for the Life Saving Service (the forerunner to the Coast Guard) to reach the men clinging to the rigging, by that time all but two were dead. One of them, Soren Nelson, the man in the middle above, died of tetanus less than a month later.

Go back for a minute, enlarge the picture and reread the words carved in the stone. "Taken from the rigging" "Died in the rigging". Eight crewmen crawled up the ropes of the sails, in the face of a howling storm. For those of you unaware, a nor'easter is basically a hurricane that comes from the northeast in the middle of winter. They spent two days with the wind, the surf, the rain and the ice, with their woolen garments saturating and freezing, waiting for rescue.

There's an old joke that's told to see how well your audience is paying attention to you. The joke goes like this: If an airplane crashed on the exact border of New York and Pennsylvania, where would they bury the survivors?

The account of the shipwreck that I read on longislandgenealogy.com says the lone survivor of this disaster, Claus Stuvens, eventually went back to sea. Which would explain, I suppose, why the stone bearing his name (on the left, above) has no date of passing. It doesn't explain why there's a stone bearing his name here at all, however. He survived, right?. There's a gravestone for the ship's captain here as well, though that same account says Capt. Squires is buried in a family plot in Southhold. The past is a curious place, indeed...

July 15, 1991

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Family Reserve

Infrared and cemeteries were made for each other as far as I'm concerned. There is just no better way to convey the other-worldliness of some graveyards than with heat-influenced exposure.

July 19, 2009

Lakeview Cemetery in Patchogue, New York is one of those places I've watched evolve over the last twenty years, from completely overgrown and forsaken during the town's mid-1980's blight to the well-kept yet sparsely visited expanse it is today. There are a number of fascinating graves as well. Victims of two local shipwrecks line the main drive, and some of the largest zinc monuments that I've ever seen are here as well. I'll be detailing them in a later entry, but today I wanted to feature the shot above of a typical family reserve, with the plot marked off by a low railing held up by concrete posts.

June 5, 2009

St. John's Episcopal church is a small, wood-framed building, easily overlooked save for a white picket fence along Montauk Highway in Oakdale. This tiny building was the first church on the south shore of the Island, built in 1765 and still standing to this day on the north side of the highway. A brick footpath leads from the door through the graveyard, past the late 19th century headstones.

Again, the infrared imaging adds to the eeriness of the picture; in straight black and white the shingles of the building would blend into the darkness of the surrounding trees and grass, while here the grass and leaves make up the highlights and midtone of the picture, instead of midtone and shadow, bringing the building and path forward as the main element of the picture.

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Theodore Roosevelt Cage Match

At the time of his death more than ninety years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was apparently thought of as a dangerous man. I mean, why else would you surround his grave with a seven-foot high wrought-iron fence topped with spikes and a deadbolt lock on the gate? What kind of effect did he have on the villagers of Oyster Bay that they would feel the need to keep his mortal remains isolated from the rest of the cemetery?

They built the cage on the top of a hill at the back of the cemetery, far away from the sight of the road. In fact, if it weren't for all the signs pointing to Sagamore Hill, and the Theodore Roosevelt Bird Sanctuary nearby, and the big parking lot with the directions to the gravesite, you'd never know the 26th president of the United States was here at all.

May 12, 2009

Or is he? Perhaps the cage wasn't meant to symbolize the public's final and everlasting restraint of tyranny, nor was it meant to contain TR's vengeful soul or to keep his zombified remains from terrorizing the local citizenry with a big stick, as was originally reported back in 1919. Perhaps instead, it was built to keep the curious and the deranged from digging up the casket to affirm the identity of the contents; to hold the pince-nez and finger his watch chain. Maybe they'd take some dental impressions, too. If there's even a body in there, and not just a pile of rocks, which, according to a new internet theory that Theodore Roosevelt faked his own death, is what you'll find.

I like the idea of a zombie TR wandering the forests in a pair of khaki jodhpurs better, though.



(Author's Note:  Very little of the above is intended to have any historical accuracy.)
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G is for Geese

April 4, 2009

Geese in graveyards. A goose walking over your grave. That feeling when a dark chill runs down your spine in an otherwise warm place. I learned as a child that when that happens, or when some other eerie event had occurred, it meant that 'a goose had walked over my grave'. A great visual to impress on the adolescent mind: that my grave exists somewhere, and every time I get a chill there's some filthy waterfowl squawking and dropping green turds all over it.

Rest in Speech

Jamesburg, New Jersey - February 2009

I had an hour to kill in industrial New Jersey the other day, hard by the turnpike amongst the warehouse parks, railroad crossings and highway overpasses. I had come to Jamesburg to have the 5D evaluated before the warranty expired. The sensor needed cleaning, but what was bothering me was that the dirt pattern was exactly the same as it had been before I last had it serviced at the end of the summer.

I was afraid that there was either some bit of stray adhesive or a scratch on the sensor filter, and that the last cleaning had only removed the accumulated grit of the previous three months. If you click on the image at the right, you'll see what I'm talking about.

All the little dots are bits of dust on the sensor, they accumulate no matter how careful you are about changing lenses, and usually don't matter, unless you wind up with the kind of honkers that you can see I've got in the upper left quadrant. I'd had an identical pattern appear not long after I got the camera. The last cleaning seemed to have eliminated them, or so I thought until a few months afterward. Since then I've been eyeing the calendar, looking for free time before the warranty ran out. This week the stars aligned, so I made a print of the dirty image and headed toward Staten Island and beyond.

Holy Trinity Cemetery, Jamesburg - February 2009

I'm glad I came when I did, given there was a sign on the door announcing that beginning March 6th sensor cleanings would now cost $30, rather than the previous nothing. I'm in CPS, Canon Professional Services, though, which entitles me to a few extras, like rush service and free overnight shipping. I left the camera for them to look at, after detailing the problem (and leaving the print).

I didn't expect they'd examine it and have an answer in an hour, though, and without a map or any clue I drove three miles west, then three miles east. I was ready to stop for coffee when I spotted this cemetery. Fairly recent, the earliest burials are around the early fifties. The majority of the family names are Polish, and for the most part completely unpronounceable.

I thought the Verb family had an interesting stone, that and the cherubic angel caught my infrared eye.

Oh, and the dirty camera? There's a scratch on the filter over the sensor. They'll replace the filter, clean the camera and overnight it to me next week.

For Four Dead Presidents

(Author's Note: The following article was originally posted three years ago, as you can see by reading the date above. Thus the reference below to Lincoln's 200th birthday is a little outdated.  This is being revived as part of Taphophile Tragics.)



This being President's Week, and with me being a well-known habitué of graveyards, I thought it would be the perfect time to, ahem, dig up a selection of photographs featuring the final resting places of some of our former leaders. Or at least the four I've been to.

With all of the celebrations for Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday last week, I think it'd be interesting to see how he spends his time these days. First, from a May, 2007 drive along Route 66, are two shots from Lincoln's tomb at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

The giant hunk of marble above may look like a sarcophagus, but it's merely a marker to cover a ten-foot deep crypt which holds what must be a very well-preserved body, as Lincoln was reportedly the poster child for the then-new art of embalming. After all, it was a long, hot train ride from Washington D. C. to Springfield, Illinois back in 1865, and millions of mourning Americans wanted a final (or more likely, first) glimpse of their fallen leader. So like a 21st century baseball player, Abe was juiced up at regular intervals along the ride home, and it's not unlikely that he'd be recognizable today.

Up there on the right is the 117-foot tall granite obelisk rising above the tomb.

(Lincoln was buried so deep, and with that huge marker on top, because of various plots to kidnap the body, one of which was attempted before this tomb was completed, when the remains were still in the cemetery's receiving vault.) 

September 1985

Grant's Tomb, on the upper west side of Manhattan, has absolutely no one buried in it. What it does have is Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia entombed within, their caskets in a well below the floor but above the ground, both housed within a domed Greek Revival temple with this simple entableture above the entrance. I used this picture for my holiday card in 1987.

Young's Memorial Cemetery, Oyster Bay, NY

Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith, rest beneath a canopy of trees not far from Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island. A set of stone steps lead up a hill to the ivy-covered private plot, the stone with its columns and bas-relief presidential seal behind a tall, wrought-iron fence.

This image is a VanGoghlaroid from May of 1998.

February 2009

Finally, with this picture we pay a visit to the Coolidge family, on a hillside of their own in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Silent Cal (or, more appropriately today, Ever-Silent Cal) has the presidential seal atop his stone, which is the second from the right. Left of that is his wife, Grace, while their sons flank them: John on the left and Calvin, Jr. on the right. Grace's matching headstone is adorned with a simple wreath, while Cal Jr.'s smaller one (he died at 16, and was the first burial in the family plot in 1924) and brother John's have wreaths with ribbons.  

Coolidge became the 30th president upon the death of Warren G. Harding, and was sworn in by his father at a quarter to three in the morning in the parlor of the nearby family home. In addition to being the only president to be born on the fourth of July, he is also the only president sworn in by a notary public.

Something curious I learned about the names of these Coolidge men. President Coolidge was named after his father, so his full name was John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (although he never used the Junior.)  Yet he gave his first son the simple name John Coolidge, then two years later named his second son Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

Enigmataphs

Vermont, 2006

Two pictures today, two headstones, from two states and two different centuries. But similar in their epitaphs, for even though they're 76 years and over two hundred fifty miles apart, both bear lamentations and warnings for their readers. Above, Mr. Elkana Cobb, in Dorset, Vermont bemoans:

Oh let me not forgotten lie
left you forget that you m-
uft die
For Death's a debt to nature due
Which I have paid and so m-
uft you.

(Note: In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was common to substitute the letter 'f' for the letter 's' in certain words; so in the above verse you should read 'left' as 'lest', and 'muft' as 'must'.)

You'd think whoever chiseled that would have realized after he tried squeezing in the 'mu(s)t' the first time that it wasn't going to fit, but that's just an example, I suppose, of Yankee stubbornness.

Long Island, NY, 2006

Meanwhile, down on Long Island in the mid- to-late nineteenth century, we have Maria Louise Doxsey, age twenty-one and a half, tragically bidding farewell to her family and reminding them that the debt she's paid is owed by everyone.

Either that or by saying: 'The debt is paid, the grave you see', she's really extolling the virtues of pre-planning your funeral. A little Yankee pragmatism.

Pilgrim's Progress

Pilgrim Hospital Cemetery - December 2008

O. Jackson lies beneath the turf just south of the Long Island Expressway, in a remote section of the grounds at one of Long Island's enormous psychiatric hospitals, in a huge field with rows of rough concrete markers flush with the ground, and probably hundreds of other, unmarked graves.

Oswald, or Otto, or Opal, or Ophelia, forgotten by family and lost in the system. They outlived their treatment and their relatives, and were buried in the back. Without even the span of their years in this world noted on the stone, just a four digit number. And a cross. I guess it was the Christian thing to do.

Pilgrim State Hospital is located just off the Sagtikos Parkway in Brentwood, not too far from Kings Park, and immediately adjacent to a nature preserve which itself is the site of another state hospital, Edgewood. No structures remain at Edgewood, though an extensive system of tunnels is rumored to run throughout the acreage.

Unlike Kings Park, which has only two or three buildings still in use, the Pilgrim property fairly bustles with life, especially on its west side. The entire site is envisioned to become, essentially, a new town, and many of the low-rise dormitories have been demolished into themselves, leaving several long stretches of road with weeds growing amidst the rubble, and overgrown sidewalks, each leading from the road to a pile of bricks and cinderblock.


Not everything is coming down, though, and for the foreseeable future, not much will be going up any time soon, either. The water tower, at the right, is slated for preservation. It still looks like it's in pretty good shape, despite the graffitti. Being an empty shell, the tank having been removed years ago, and mostly built of masonary, and so not too flammable, it has survived the years, and is expected to be a center of the new community, whenever that may be.

MEGO data: Both these pictures were made with the 5D set to shoot in monochrome. I used the 17-40mm lens full wide. For the water tower, I was shooting vertically, and trying to keep the structure symmetrical, straight, and keep the light shining through the two upper windows.

Rockville Cemetery

Rockville Cemetery sits on a large swathe of land at Ocean Avenue and Merrick Road, right on the border of Lynbrook and Rockville Centre. It dates back to the late eighteenth century, and was once a churchyard. Today it's a non-sectarian burying ground, still open, and noted for several things, among them a large eastern section of ground-level markers (with a smaller section on the western border), numerous zinc markers, and the stele (above) marking the mass graves and memorializing the victims of two great shipwrecks off the coast of Long Island in the late 1830's.

The zinc markers, I think, are my favorite finds in any cemetery. They were originally marketed as 'white bronze', and sometimes are mistakenly referred to as cast-iron. They weather well, and nothing grows on them because of the chemical reaction of zinc and organic material. It seems that families would purchase a marker and erect it with the first death. As more family members joined the reserve, the decorative panels on the other three sides would be removed and replaced with names and dates and epitaphs. Occasionally there will be granite footstones nearby.

Legend has it that many of these hollow monuments were used as drop points for bootleggers during Prohibition. Perhaps some were, once or twice, for small amounts, but the absolute bother of moving bottles in and out of the small openings makes the idea rather unlikely. If they were used at all it was more sensible that they'd be used as money drops.

A Few More Infrared Shots

Bethpage Cemetery - Bethpage, August 2008

We've been having some really great clouds the last few days, along with the accompanying afternoon thunderstorms, of course, and the effects of the IR camera help to bring out the most in them. Infrared also helps to bring the extraordinary out of the mundane, I think. Mary Abbott's white bronze marker (below) sits in the dark shadows at the rear of the Powell cemetery in Bethpage. In a straightforward image, the scene is very dark, the tones of the marker being only slightly lighter than the surrounding foliage. But the infrared image turns shadows into highlights and induces an ethereal sense to the picture.

These were taken August 9, 2008, in the Bethpage Cemetery and the Powell Cemetery, located just south of the entrance to the Bethpage Park golf courses.

Quaker Meeting House - August 2008

Hope Cemetery

With Sherry in Ottawa for two days earlier this week, I decided to take advantage of both her absence and a nearly full moon to hie myself off to Vermont for a few days. For some time now, I've been thinking about doing time exposures, i.e., long exposures of thirty seconds to five minutes of nighttime landscapes. Being on Long Island this isn't the easiest thing to arrange, given the amount of light pollution we have, but in the mountains I wouldn't have any of those worries.

Except for the weather, that is. I arrived to find the mountain under a cloud, with rain continuing throughout the night. Monday dawned overcast, and according to the weather reports, was due to stay that way all day and all night. So much for eerie nighttime moonscapes. After breakfast I loaded my backpack into the car, and drove north to the city of Barre, just outside the state capital of Montpelier.

Hope Cemetery on Maple Avenue is the permanent home to some of the finest examples of granite carving and design you will find just about anywhere. The monument on the right stands a mile or so from the cemetery at the intersection of Main Street and Maple Avenue. The base reads: "In honor of all Italian-Americans whose achievements have enriched the social, cultural and civic vitality of this city, state and region. Erected by their descendants and friends 1985".

Getting to the cemetery itself, several acres spread over rolling hills, and you're struck by not only the quality of the stones, but the many types you'll encounter.

For starters, you've got balls:

And you'll find cubes:


Not one but two pyramids:


And a maple leaf:

Of course, simple shapes aren't enough for some people. So it's interesting to note that while people are encouraged to be careful about where they leave their vehicles, the residents have no such restrictions, and there's at least one grave with a car parked right on top:

People have many different ideas about their 'final resting place'. Some are quite the traditionalists, right down to separate beds:

Others take a less formal approach:

(Although, just as in life, the remote is nowhere to be seen.)

Some of the other stones with a light-hearted approach to death include the biplane, soaring above cloud nine:

And not far from the plane you'll find this crouching, contented cat:

Today's visit to Hope Cemetery has been sponsored by the letter "A":

All pictures taken Monday, July 21, 2008