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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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Mausoleum faces its own mortality |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Thursday, 30 June 2005 |
June 29, 2005
BY DANIEL BARBARISI
Journal Staff Writer
CRANSTON -- These dead lie in a dying building. The Roger Williams Park Mausoleum, tucked away within feet of the Providence line in the Washington Park neighborhood, is crumbling around them.
A local builder, Thomas Cullinan, opened it in 1926 as a profit-making venture that immediately captured the attention of the relatively well-heeled, who saw it as a status symbol. The three-story building, on Cyr Street, was named for the Providence municipal park that it abuts.
About 300 bodies were entombed in the temple-like mausoleum -- the first in Rhode Island -- through 2002, some of the earliest ones relocated from burial plots.
Among the last to be placed in its marble-fronted vaults were the original owner's daughters Helen Cullinan, who died in 2000, and Katherine E. Cullinan, who followed her in 2002, both in their nineties.
After Katherine's death, the Superior Court ordered the mausoleum into receivership. A trust fund the sisters maintained had by then dwindled to $15,000, nowhere near enough to slow the building's deterioration.
A rubberized cap installed to remedy a leaking roof caused more problems than it solved, filling with water and actually pulling in the walls, dislodging bricks.
Today, the upper floors are crumbling, as are the marble facades of the vaults.
In January, the City of Cranston condemned the mausoleum as being in imminent danger of collapse. The court-appointed receiver, lawyer Joseph Ferrucci, secured the building and fenced off the property -- angering some who had occasionally visited their deceased kin.
At least one person is holding out a flicker of hope for the mausoleum.
Cristine DeMarco, a stonecarver and paint consultant at a local hardware store, says she wants to acquire the building and, under the aegis of a nonprofit corporation, seek its listing on the National Register of Historic Places and raise money for its restoration and maintenance.
DeMarco never met either of the Cullinan sisters. She bought and move into their house, immediately abutting the mausoleum, after Katherine's death.
"The building is totally compromised structurally," she said. "I'm nervous about it decaying on my watch. ... It used to be much more shabilly elegant than it is now."
"I felt -- I don't know what I felt. I just felt an obligation to keep it up for the [Cullinan] sisters," she said.
DeMarco has discussed her idea with the receiver, Ferrucci, who says he is receptive.
In the meantime, Ferrucci is worried about liability for the structure. Within a month, he said, he will petition the Superior Court to ask the City of Cranston to take responsibility for the mausoleum, under an obscure section of state law giving municipalities jurisdiction over historic cemeteries.
If the city is willing to do so, he said, DeMarco could pursue her efforts to save and repair the building.
"It's an extraordinarily unique circumstance, and in a sense it's a very sad one," Ferrucci said.
If neither effort is successful, it is unclear what would happen next. At some point, the state Department of Health would have to deal with the bodies.
The mausoleum, an imposing structure built of reddish-brown Massachusetts granite and reinforced concrete, overlooks the Oaklawn Cemetery. Research has turned up no evidence that the architect -- who drew up the plans for a group that went broke and sold the venture to Thomas Cullinan -- ever designed anything else.
The receiver has tried, with limited success, to reach relatives and advise them of the state of affairs. Some of those who did respond, he said, removed their loved ones' bodies.
The mausoleum reportedly gets some dubious visitors. Just before it was condemned, a few vampire enthusiasts came to explore the building. And DeMarco said others have told her that, on some nights, a woman in a black robe walks through the cemetery and around the mausoleum.
For the most part, though, the building is forgotten -- and to DeMarco, that is a fate worse than death.
http://www.projo.com/westbay/content/projo_20050629_crmaus.2412b89.html |
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