Most interesting was a tomb unlike any I’ve seen. The “Cocoon of Love”, an egg-shaped crypt with branch-link tendrils etched on its sides, houses Rosalind Stashin Roberts (1923-1985). I am by no means the most worldly surveyor of unusual graves but this one seemed distinctive.
If one is inclined to assess relative vanities then it is interesting to compare the comparatively modest Bloomingdale mausoleum with that of the Johnston brothers, interred at the mighty Johnston Mausoleum at Calvary. The Johnstons operated a dry goods shop which, in its day, was about as well-known as today’s Filene’s Basement or Burlington Coat Factory. The Johnston store is mostly erased from public memory, yet their mausoleum must be 10 times the size of the tomb of the far more famous Bloomingdale.
I passed through the Linden Hill yard en route to nowhere, though the journey had a senseless urgency about it. At Queens Plaza and decided to take whatever bus came next, no matter where it was headed. That bus turned out to be the Q39 to Ridgewood, which I took to Metropolitan Avenue and Eliot Avenue. The route itself offered little adventure, mostly covering streets I’ve traveled many times over.
I liked some of the street names in Ridgewood: Himrod, Tonsor, and Nurge. At Metropolitan and Himrod was a Carvel Ice Cream Shop with old school signage. I grabbed a cup of bright green ice cream and walked to Fresh Pond Road, where I spotted an EVergreen telephone exchange name number. 
I used to do a little happy dance when I spotted one of these old phone numbers, and it still excites me to see them, though I stopped with the frivolity and foppishness. EXchange name sightings make me feel as if I cracked an old code. I have seen a few EVergreen Exchanges but the newest EXchange for my collection is HAvemeyer, an exchange name new to me when I saw it in an alley off of Queens Boulevard.
The day’s long ramble through Queens sent me through Mt. Olivet Cemetery, which looked so beautiful that day I decided not to take any pictures. Sometimes I spend so much time photographing places that I don’t even see them, and I made a deliberate choice to turn back that tendency at Mt. Olivet, a space more beautiful than others of similar purpose by virtue of it being a carefully landscaped garden cemetery.
I did score one photo on the way out. Some years ago, on my first visit to Mt. Olivet, I spotted an amazing European Purple Beech tree, an astounding blast of branches which in my mind echoed the image of those who had raised their arms to the skies in lamentations of the dead. The tree, nearly dead, had succumbed to a virus which had strangled hundreds of trees of this type on the east coast. A year or so later, though, I was back at Mt. Olivet and I thought that this tree showed some signs of returning to life. Alas, it was not to be. I looked for the beech tree this week and it was gone. On its stump had been placed dozens of stones, customary tokens of respect placed by visitors to the burial sites of the dead. Beautiful.
Post a Comment