Woodlawn, in the Bronx. The topic came up in that Pearl White thread, so I looked it up, and zowie! More show-biz people than you can shake a stick at, if that’s what you enjoy.
Besides political, sports and other celebs, we have the graves of Nora Bayes, Irving Berlin, Vernon and Irene Castle, George M. Cohan, Lotta Crabtree, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Olive Thomas and Marilyn Miller (both married to Jack Pickford, poor girls), Florence Mills, Smith and Dale, Laurette Taylor, Nat Wills . . . Do let’s arrange a summer trip? I’ll get in touch and see if and when tours are conducted.
Well, if I could afford to come to New York, and that good-lookin’ mod from the last tour was going to be there, I would show up. But I’m afraid for now you will have to count me as present in spirit only. Sigh.
Baker, Eve seems to prefer people there in spirit only, or else she’d spend less time in cemeteries.
Eve, if you’re ever in Chicago, we should do the Chicago Ghost Tour, though the Haunted Pub Crawl is more SDMB. Or visit the final resting place of Oscar Mayer, Charles Schwab, Montgomery Ward, and Richard Sears (I don’t know where they buried Roebuck) at the Rosehill Cemetery.
I’ll come only if I get to tell the story of the strange death of John Purroy Mitchel, youngest chief exec of NYC, aka “The Boy Mayor.”
PS – I can’t wait to see this guy’s grave.
Geoffrey Spence Millet
He died on his birthday by falling on an ink eraser evading six young woman trying to give him a birthday kiss in offices of the Metropolitan Life Building.
Sure, stuyguy, don’t you just love showing up the tour guides with your mayoral trivia.
And I don’t know if we should indulge Eve on this one. Go on a cemetary tour wiht her one weekend, and the next one she’s asking to go on another. If we let her get away with this, the next thing you know it’ll be nothing but crypts and tombstones from her all the time.
We’ve got to look for the old willow tree near Herman Melville’s grave…that’s where, one dark night some seventy years ago, bagman Dr. Jafsie Cordon handed over $50,000 to the man later identified as Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Lt. Commander George Washington De Long, master of the Jeanette, famed for freezing to death during a secret expedition to the Arctic, has a very nifty monument.
Mayor LaGuardia also has a very cool stone.
And one of my all-time favorite memorials is there, too…the Anna Blaksley Bliss sculpture group.
Sooo, do they actually have tours, or do we just wander aimlessly about, getting lost and eventually have our bleached bones found somewhere near Olive Thomas’ mausoleum? 22 acres, I hear, and I’ll wager all the good graves are not conveniently near one another . . .
Dunno. I’ve only gone about with my trusty Permanent New Yorkers in hand. Did I mention the Huntington moneybags mausoleum? Wow. Huge. Plus there’s a nice monument nearby to his mistress.
They DO give you groovy celebrity grave maps at the office and are generally welcoming to tourists, as opposed to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood, which until a few years ago treated you like you’d walked in wearing huge Army boots specifically to kick over tombstones.
Wandering aimlessly about got me to Bat Masterson, Miles Davis, Alexander Archipenko, Nellie Bly, Admiral Farragut, James Montgomery Flagg, W.C. Handy, Otto Preminger, Joseph Pulitzer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Ruth Snyder. Not too shabby, eh?
Oooops, forgot to mention Fritz Kreisler, the great concert violinist and forger!
Uhhhhhhhhhhh…suuuuuuure…um
It has the tomb of that little tree that wanted to be a christmas tree but got left behind because it’s too darn small, uhhhh that tree that was in Citizen Kane… and um… a tomb for the only pear tree that Jonny Appleseed ever planted!!!
Also there are tombs of famous Canadian people that are not tree related.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ruth Snyder? The Happiness Girls? I am so there.
OK, I’ll find out about tours, and lacking them, we will shanghai Ike and his book, and find a weekend everyone can make it this summer. Barbie Twins optional.