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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
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The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
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Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Dust-Up Over Center for Grants Tomb |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Sunday, 01 August 2004 |
By ALEX MINDLIN
August 1, 2004
ust across Riverside Drive from Grant's Tomb, at 122nd Street, is a little colonnaded pavilion, modeled after a Greek temple, with a cliffside view of the Hudson. The tomb itself, renovated in the mid-90's, is a gleaming white; not so the pavilion, which is the brown of a rotting tooth, and partly hidden behind scaffolding and chicken wire.
This may soon change. Under the terms of a deal that will be the subject of a City Council hearing on Aug. 9, the city's Department of Parks and Recreation is seeking to yield partial ownership of the site to the National Park Service. In return the Park Service, which already oversees Grant's Tomb, would restore the hilltop pavilion, and also use its lower floor, which is below street level, as a visitor's center for the tomb. Long-closed bathrooms already on that floor would be fixed and reopened.
But the plan has its opponents, chief among them Michael Gotkin, a preservationist and landscape architect. "If they want bathrooms and a gift shop," he said, "they should be building a small free-standing pavilion adjacent to the tomb." Mr. Gotkin said that an elevator for the handicapped to be installed beside the pavilion would be ugly and block northward views from within, that the transfer to federal ownership would leave the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission powerless to protect the site, and that the pavilion is historically unconnected to the tomb.
"You can't see the tomb" from the pavilion, which was built for the views of the Palisades, he said. "We're on one of the highest points in Manhattan; that's why they're both here," he added. "They're not related physically or historically." The tomb was built in 1897, the pavilion in 1910.
The move would rid the tomb of book racks and museum displays that now occupy a corner of its giant, spare upper floor. "The tomb was originally built with no visitor services at all," said Steve Laise, chief of interpretation for the Park Service's Manhattan sites. "It was intended to be a very dignified mausoleum. Any intrusion of that kind is a compromise with the purpose of the tomb."
This is not Mr. Gotkin's first clash with the Park Service over the tomb, which had more than 67,000 visitors last year. In 1997, several years after the tomb was transferred to federal control, the Park Service tried to remove a long stretch of psychedelic, slightly garish mosaic benches, designed in the 1970's, that lined one side of the monument. Mr. Gotkin helped organize protests that ultimately stopped the removal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/nyregion/01visi.html |
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