{"id":2219,"date":"2012-04-16T08:59:47","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T12:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=2219"},"modified":"2014-05-14T12:06:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T16:06:51","slug":"parapets-pinnacles-and-perpetuity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2012\/04\/parapets-pinnacles-and-perpetuity\/","title":{"rendered":"Parapets, Pinnacles and Perpetuity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Purchase <\/a> \"View <\/a>Monument Cemetery Gatehouse just before demolition, Broad Street at Berks Street, March 3, 1903.<\/span><\/div>\n

Philadelphians were dying to get out of town in the 1830s and 1840s\u2014and so were city dwellers just about everywhere. Parisians started the trend, opting for a rural burial at Le P\u00e8re Lachaise Cemetery before Americans caught the bug. Soon, the living from Boston to Baltimore, Detroit to Dayton, Pittsburgh to Philadelphia transformed romantic rural landscapes into perpetual theme parks for the dead. Or so they thought.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia\u2019s Laurel Hill Cemetery<\/a> overlooking the Schuylkill River opened in 1836. The following year Monument Cemetery on Broad Street started up. Then came Woodlands<\/a> in West Philadelphia and the business model took off. Cemeteries selling families plots of picturesque real estate with mellow names like Cedar Hill, Glenwood, Greenwood, Mount Moriah, Mount Peace, and Mount Vernon cropped up all over the unbuilt landscape. Fashionable folk anticipated spending eternity in the peaceful Philadelphia countryside.<\/p>\n

One of the founders of Monument Cemetery, the artist John Sartain, planned to reside there after his long and productive life as an engraver. Sartain enjoyed the memory of Broad Street in the 1830s when it was only a lane \u201cnarrowed in still further by a ditch on either side, behind which was a post-and-rail fence, the boundary of adjacent fields.\u201d He sketched a design for a Gothic gatehouse to welcome both permanent residents and short-term visitors.<\/p>\n

But Broad Street was no country lane. Anticipating that its boulevard-like width should carry northward from the built-up city as far as the eye could see, cemetery managers agreed to set back their gatehouse \u201cprovided the other land owners on both sides of the street would do the same\u201d and plant \u201ca double row of trees along each sidewalk.\u201d And Broad Street, Sartain later recalled, was \u201cwidened to its present breadth…extending this noble avenue thirteen miles in length, straight as a ray of light.\u201d There, behind his \u201cGothic parapet and pinnacles,\u201d Sartain expected to reside for eternity.<\/p>\n

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“Chapel and principal entrance to the Monument Cemetery, Philadelphia,” 1850. (Library Company of Philadelphia.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But as long as there is life, there are compromises.<\/p>\n

While away in Europe, Sartain\u2019s gatehouse was \u201cspoiled by a member of the board of managers\u2026a carpenter\u2026who considered that every building must have a projecting cornice.\u201d\u00a0 Away went Sartain’s Gothic roofline and up came Italianate woodwork. As Sartain bluntly put it in his memoir titled, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man<\/a><\/em>, \u201cmy original design is now travestied.\u201d<\/p>\n

That would hardly be the least of it\u2014or<\/em> the last of it. Only six years after Sartain was buried beneath his brownstone monument topped by a sphinx, the city extended Berks Street and demolished the gatehouse\u2014after documenting it front<\/a> (illustrated) and back<\/a>. Now\u00a0transected by a tree-lined Berks Street<\/a>, Monument Cemetery filled with up with Sartain\u2019s relatives and about 28,000 others. In 1929, the last lot-holder was laid to rest.<\/p>\n

Rest in peace? Not on your life. At Monument Cemetery, there would be irony in the mourning. By the 1950s, as we\u2019re graphically informed here<\/a> and there<\/a>, Monument Cemetery\u2019s real estate would be reclaimed for parking by the adjacent, expanding Temple University. Cranes lifted caskets and coffins which made their way to Lawnview Cemetery in suburban Rockledge. Headstones and monuments, however, including the one Sartain had designed for himself, were carted off to another form of finality, as landfill<\/a> on the banks of the Delaware River at Brideburg, not far from where the Betsy Ross Bridge would soon rise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monument Cemetery Gatehouse just before demolition, Broad Street at Berks Street, March 3, 1903. Philadelphians were dying to get out of town in the 1830s and 1840s\u2014and so were city dwellers just about everywhere. Parisians started the trend, opting for a rural burial at Le P\u00e8re Lachaise Cemetery before Americans caught the bug. Soon, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}