This monument in the Victorian Romantic style is such a jumble of metaphors that old Pa Pitt is reluctant to try to untangle it. A number of elements—calla, ferns, cushion, scroll, drapery, rustic seat—are rendered individually with great realism, but thrown together in an extraordinarily unlikely way. The monument can be found (but probably won’t be found by most people) in a nearly forgotten German Lutheran cemetery on a hillside in Beechview.
The Butler Street gatehouse was part of the original design of the cemetery in the 1840s, and it serves its function perfectly. From a busy city street we enter a romantic fantasy landscape that might have come straight from Sir Walter Scott. The contrast is almost as great as the contrast between life and afterlife.
The Union Dale Cemetery was to the city of Allegheny what the Allegheny Cemetery was to the city of Pittsburgh: the place where the rich and prominent went to their final rest, taking as much of their wealth with them as possible. It occupies an even more precipitous hillside from which, through the trees, we can catch occasional glimpses of the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. These pictures were taken with a Kiev-4A camera.
What better way to remember all the saints than with a few of Father Pitt’s favorite cemetery pictures?
The Becker memorial in an old German cemetery in Beechview.
A model of the Pantheon, at only slightly reduced scale, in the Allegheny Cemetery.
An octagonal Gothic mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery.
A row of tombstones in the Allegheny Cemetery takes on an air of mystery, thanks to a seventy-year-old lens.
The door of the Winter mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery shows Mr. Winter as an Egyptian pharaoh about to depart for his journey to the underworld.
The Eberhardt and Ober brewery in Dutchtown was a Pittsburgh institution. Its beer was affectionately known as E & O—for “Early & Often,” as the advertisements put it. Mr. Eberhardt and Mr. Ober now rest side by side in the Allegheny Cemetery in matching but not identical mausoleums.
If you simply can’t settle for less, why not rest eternally in a replica of one of the world’s most famous monuments? These impressive memorials are in the Allegheny Cemetery.
In the nineteenth century, churches usually built their cemeteries outside the city. At the turn of the twentieth, when the rapidly expanding streetcar lines triggered a storm of new development all around Pittsburgh, many of those cemeteries ended up surrounded by crowded urban neighborhoods. This one in Beechview is not quite forgotten; someone comes to mow it two or three times a year, but much of it is so overgrown by now that it’s immune to the mower.
Death is certainly worthwhile if the reward of it is this ideal romantic landscape.
The style of architecture called Egyptian Revival had its heyday in the 1920s. In Pittsburgh it is almost always associated with death: we find it especially in mausoleums and in memorial dealers. The style always teeters on the edge of kitsch unless, as here, it is handled with restraint and taste. The setting of this mausoleum, under the shade of mighty trees, gives it a calm dignity it probably didn’t have when it was built.
“Romantic” is a vague term, but in the Allegheny Cemetery there is a certain class of tombstones for which no other adjective seems appropriate. Asymmetry and an imitation in stone of forms from the vegetable kingdom are their distinguishing traits.
The Wilkins family monument crosses the line from simple romanticism into morbid romanticism. It depicts the Wilkins family as a tree trunk, with each deceased member as a branch cut off from the trunk. The metaphor, if carried to its logical conclusion, suggests that the family is extinct, leaving nothing but a dead stump. But someone must have paid for that monument, which is really quite colossal in person.
