Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture and Art

“I would love to have been there when they called in their architect and said, ‘There’s one more thing you need to design for us,’” says Susan Olsen, imagining a conversation between the Standard Oil heir Edward Harkness and the architect James Gamble Rogers. Rogers designed the buildings that Harkness donated to Yale, Harvard and Columbia; Harkness’s Fifth Avenue mansion; and, indeed, his final resting place: a neo-Gothic burial chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx. Olsen, the director of historical services at Woodlawn, adds that Harkness was not alone in wanting a mausoleum in the same style, and created with the same hands, as his lifetime milieu.

John H. Harbeck had an interesting, but contentious life, for despite the fact he already had a common law wife, Caroline, in New York, he fell in love with, and married, Kate Hammel, a telegraph operator 19 years his junior. This of course, resulted in a legal mess when Caroline filed for divorce, however, she was unsuccessful in her suit. Harbeck and Kate spent much of their time in Colorado, where they had a second home. In 1910, Harbeck (around age 70) died at the Plaza Hotel in New York and Kate paid New York inheritance taxes, but Colorado wanted its fair share of the Harbeck holdings and sued. Harbeck lived and died in style and his elaborate Renaissance Revival mausoleum (above), designed in 1918 by Theodore Blake, is situated in a prominent oval lot forming an island in the cemetery’s Parkview Avenue and it is, without doubt, the most magnificent tomb in Woodlawn.

As the new exhibit “Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art and Landscape at Woodlawn” demonstrates, the cemetery is an ideal place to view work by leading architects, landscape designers, and artisans in close proximity, with gardens by Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman, and the Olmsted Brothers, architecture by Rogers, McKim, Mead & White and Carrère and Hastings, tile vaults by the Guastavinos, stained glass by Tiffany Studios, and sculptures by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Established in 1863, as a more convenient alternative to Green-Wood Cemetery (early advertisements emphasized its location as only thirty minutes from Manhattan by train, unlike the ferry journey to Brooklyn), Woodlawn Cemetery tells a story rich with railroad lore, new-money positioning, design trends, and the history of craft. The exhibition, co-organized by Woodlawn Cemetery and Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, at Columbia University, is drawn from archives donated to Avery, in 2006, museum loans and the thirteen hundred mausoleums themselves. It combines architectural drawings, vintage photographs, and early maps with marble busts, wrought-iron gates, and a huge stained-glass window – all the better to express the diversity of cemetery enterprise. (This fall, walking tours will also highlight specific aspects of the design of the four-hundred-acre grounds.)

Among Woodlawn’s designers are many women – the leading landscape architects Farrand and Shipman and the sculptors Whitney, Janet Scudder, and Sally James Farnham. Farnham came late to sculpture, after her husband, the Tiffany designer Paulding Farnham, gave her clay to play with while she was recuperating from an illness. Her 1915 statue of a nude, weary woman, titled “At the End of the Day” (above) marks the grave of the dancer Vernon Castle. Castle’s widow, Irene, saw the sculpture on exhibit and asked Farnham to enlarge it. Then, as now, all memorial designs have to be approved by cemetery officials. Nudes are fine, as was a recently submitted weight-lifting angel.

One of the most exquisite objects in the exhibition is a 1934 bronze chair from the Metz mausoleum by Marie Zimmerman, an early twentieth-century designer best known for her jewelry. It’s tiny, almost like a camp chair, but the strapping is metal and the feet are – disturbingly – those of a faun. When I asked Olsen why so many of the graves showcased work by women, the answer was not that memorial work, being private, was considered a more suitable job for a woman, but that many more women emerged in the design professions in the early twentieth century. “Being an artist was considered okay,” Olsen said. “A memorial was a very personal commission, and people were usually selected after they had done other work for a client, like their office and home.”

How might modern-day magnates translate the look of their home or office into the afterlife? My first thoughts were urns shaped like iPhones and mausoleums that resembled maple cubes. The online magazine Dezeen has featured work by a design student who combined resin and ashes to make memorials that can be held in the hand – no cemetery required. Meanwhile, laser etching can make a photorealistic headstone – no symbolism required for our literalist, selfie-driven age. But these new-model memorials still exist in the physical world, or I.R.L. Olsen told me that, from railroads to polished granite and from embalming to lasers, cemeteries have always followed trends in technology and culture. Cities of the dead aren’t disconnected from cities of the living but are rather extensions of them. Technology does not separate us from the past; it democratizes public memorials, whether in stone or in pixels.

As technology advances us toward a life in which both home and office become temporary, time-shared places, people are imagining cemeteries morphing into memory palaces where one can go to see slide shows or to hear podcasts of the deceased (a better option, perhaps, than the high-density skyscraper cemetery, albeit less convenient than the Facebook memorial). For all their picturesque calm, cemeteries have always been both teeming and empty; the digital version would embrace that contradiction. The design we take personal pleasure from everyday is now less likely to be architecture and more likely to be an interface. Today’s Harkness might do better to call in her interaction designer.