Stuck in a Photographic Rut

I was in the supermarket a couple weeks ago with my wife and child when we bumped into a friend of ours. Maria is a photography professor at one of Philadelphia’s art colleges. We’ve been friends for several years and I greatly admire her work as well as the historical retrospective photography exhibits (link at end) she has produced and curated.

She told me how much she enjoys reading this blog. I was grateful, a bit embarrassed, and curiously, I began to feel guilty for not spending much time writing about photography. (I also feel guilty about not updating my PhotographerCoach.com website in forever!) 

"Rocky's" deceased wife, Adrian

I started thinking about the fact that in my blog, I’ve gravitated toward using photography as a means of documenting things, to prove I was there – the real world. Originally, I would write about a particular fine art photograph that I made, how I made it or perhaps the details related to my bringing it into existence. Now, the photographs at times do no more than punctuate my words. As a result, my photography recently has become more journalistic than fine art. The images are not exactly snap-shoddy, but they have veered off my intended path. While it’s true that I’ve continued to enter some juried art shows and attend events to sell my work, these mainly involve older images.

Available at Amazon.com

I suppose I could just continue the documentary-style photography and hope someone will archive it all into a book like Michael Lesy did with Charles Van Schaick’s Wisconsin Death Trip. But I REALLY like making fine art photographs! It’s a way of creating fantasy out of reality for me. So how do I get back on track with what I truly like to do? Or better yet, achieve a better balance between the fine art images and the documentary photos?

I began thinking about a presentation that my friend Maria made a few years ago to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. The presentation was a slide show and lecture about her recent trip to Italy. Maria creates wonderful fine art photography. Her images in the presentation, however, were travelogue photos of the Italian countryside and its people. Hers are the type of travel snapshots you would expect a seasoned professional photographer to take. Maybe I need to hone this skill.

"Death" in the English Cemetery

Travel, of course, is a great way to get your creative juices flowing. I was in Italy too, a few years ago, but only came back with tombstone photographs! While the English Cemetery in Florence was beautiful, perhaps I should have looked at the rest of the beauty around me. (If you’re a cemetery photographer, by the way, Italian sculpture has everything else beat!)

Get Out of Your Element

Making photographs outside your usual stomping grounds is certainly a good way to get your creative juices flowing. However, you don’t need to travel all the way to another country for a change of scenery – often such new experiences appear in your own back yard. For example, I attended the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood recently to enjoy the festival and take photographs. Even if a certain kind of art is not your forte (e.g. building bicycle-powered vehicles), you can still get ideas from other people’s creativity. After seeing the Amish buggy, I realized that I should make a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see what Amish graves look like. Hmmm. Never even thought about that! In addition to the wonderful vehicles, the woman standing next to me in the crowd was a member of the Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia, a group of artists who create art out of trash (I’d always wondered what those people looked like!). When you talk with artists who work in a different medium, your own creativity can be stimulated.

If you feel like you’re in a rut and want to get out, there are all sorts of catalysts standing by, waiting for your call. Travel is just one of them. A photographer can learn things by hanging out with other photographers, but why limit yourself? While I certainly expect to learn some new things when I attend the AGS (Association for Gravestone Studies) conference next month, I already live in this world. It’s useful to jump the rails and land in an entirely different sphere every so often. You can learn things from wildly disparate sources, like seeing how the arts and crafters display their wares at art shows and talking with painters and sculptors about how they create. Such experiences help you see things from a different perspective. Everyone has artistic skills to share – for instance, I’ve gotten useful get tips about marketing my work from a friend who is a competitive BBQ chef.

Amish zombies at Kinetic Sculpture Race

Not being an academically-trained artist, I need all the help I can get. In my quest to create more of a balance between my documentary photography and my fine art work, I like to refer to those who have gone before me, to learn from their experience as well as my own. A reference I recently stumbled upon is Deanna Wood’s “Emerging Artist” blog. She has an archive called “Helpful Posts” which covers many of the anxiety-producing details that artists find themselves dealing with. Topics include “Hanging Artwork,” “Writing an Artist’s Statement,” “How Galleries Choose Artists,” and my personal favorite, “Rejection.” Since you REALLY would like nothing more than to just create your art, it’s helpful to have these essential things laid bare in front of you. Eliminating the guess-work of the real world helps me to concentrate more on my make-believe world.

Related Readings:

Maria DiElsi's "Artway Project"
Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia
Deanna Wood’s “Emerging Artist” blog
Ed Snyder's Photographercoach.com 
Ed book, Digital Photography for the Impatient:

Available from Amazon.com

Vote for Woodlawn Cemetery!

Over the years I’ve visited Woodlawn Cemetery in New York’s Bronx borough a few times, and it is a magnificent place. If you’re a cemetery photographer, it is a must-see. It’s one of the first cemeteries I found myself accidentally locked in, and oddly, the first cemetery I later intentionally allowed myself to be locked in, just so I could photograph the magnificent statuary! (Read more about that at the link below.)

For me the cemetery brought about other firsts – the first grandly opulent cemetery I’d ever seen where the statuary, landscaping, and mausoleums were laid out (pun intended) to breathtaking effect. It was all so precise yet natural − the first classical ‘garden’ cemetery I’d seen that was in such perfect condition. Woodlawn was also the site of my first paranormal cemetery experience (and you can read about that here), brought on by my desire to photograph this angel statue. 

The gargoyle detail you see above is from the cemetery's Belmont mausoleum (near the Jerome Avenue gate) - arguably one of the most fascinating mausoleums on the planet. It is a full-scale replica of the Chapel of St. Hubert in France, designed by Leonardo Da Vinci in the “Gothic Flamboyant” style in the early 1500s. The structure is the size of a small church and was the reason for my accidental lock-in all those years ago.

I’m telling you all this for two reasons: 1) you should visit; and 2) Woodlawn is competing with forty other New York City sites for a grant award to help with funding and restoration projects – and they can use your vote!

The cemetery is participating in the Partners In Preservation program, an initiative to give away three million dollars in New York City. Sponsored by  American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Partners in Preservation is a community-based program which provides preservation grants for local historic places. If you’ve ever been to Woodlawn and experienced its splendor, you’ll want to vote for them! So please take a moment to do so now: Vote!

Woodlawn Cemetery website
Read: Locked in and Climbing Out
Read: Voices in the Cemetery

2nd Anniversary of "The Cemetery Traveler!"

Well, it’s been two years since I began writing The Cemetery Traveler blog. That’s most of my two-and-a-half year-old daughter’s lifetime – a fact that puts all that work into startling perspective for me. I’ve posted 120 articles and have 144 regular subscriber/followers. I greatly appreciate the fact that you’re reading this and hope you will continue. 

Daughter Olivia at Laurel Hill Cemetery

After 120 blog postings, you might think I’ve run out of material, especially since these postings have not been just a photo and a few sentences. They’ve been more substantial than even I expected they would be. The articles began as short pieces, but then the content took on a life of its own. I began to get carried away – the blogs started to read like mid-career Dickens. Frankly I’m surprised they held peoples’ attention. But readers responded. In blog comments and private emails, they expressed opinions. Many of the most commented-on pieces were about abandoned cemeteries.

When I started The Cemetery Traveler, my intent was mostly to recount my past experiences traipsing through the graveyards of America (and Europe), camera in tow. However, through Facebook I’ve encountered new ideas, new friends, and made new excursions. I’ve written (or will write) about a variety of people with whom I’ve had interactions in reference to my blog – a psychic, a film maker, descendants of people whose graves I’ve photographed, Andy Warhol’s niece and nephew, Victorian-era and Civil War re-enactors, and fellow writers. I’ve also met new companion adventurers (or ‘gravers,’ as we’re sometimes called!).



Ed's photograph in "175 Years of Reflections"



On rare occasion, I actually wrote about photography (e.g. my blog about ‘painting with light’ in a cemetery at night). This past year saw the publication of the book, 175 Years of Reflections, Laurel Hill Cemetery, which one of my photographs was chosen to be in. The book celebrates Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery and its 175^th anniversary.

Abandoned Cemeteries

Probably one of the least expected results of the The Cemetery Traveler blog has been my interest in helping to restore abandoned and run-down cemeteries around Philadelphia .

Mt. Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia

Initially, I started exploring and photographing them like they were carnival sideshow attractions. However, my postings generated quite a bit of heated discussion, mostly from the “how could they let this happen” crowd, but also from descendants of people buried in those cemeteries! I received messages like this (related to Philadelphia’s gigantic abandoned Mt. Moriah Cemetery):

"Mount Moriah holds different emotions for different people. I have family here. As a child in the 70s, I actually played and rode my bicycle with my friends in this place. The people buried here need people to speak for them and try to undo the damage that has been done to them. Help us to do that with your lens. And if you are adventurous, come to a clean-up. They are inspiring and lets those buried here that someone still gives a damn."

Primarily as a result of people commenting on my blogs, I have participated in several clean-up days, and the comment is correct – the work is inspiring.

Tombstone under Betsy Ross Bridge

I also received many comments and emails about the destruction of Monument Cemetery (Philadelphia, 1956), and the unceremonious dumping of its thousands of headstones into the Delaware River. I received dozens of emails from descendants, looking for traces of their ancestors. The stones can still be seen under the Betsy Ross Bridge (at low tide), so I photographed them, and added the names, dates, and photos of the stones to the online database at FindAGrave.com, as suggested by one reader, whose initial comment to me was:

"While their graves may never be found, their information would be of great interest to family, historians, and genealogists."

The majority of comments  related to the destruction of Monument Cemetery were of this nature:

"I came across your site while trying to locate this cemetery so I could visit my ancestors' tombstones, as many of them were buried at Monument. I feel a bit sick realizing they're now in a mass grave and their tombstones have been dumped like this."

"I join many of those who are horrified that this could have happened in Philadelphia during the 1950's.  It seems so disrespectful and almost sinister in that advertisements were not required to be made in the newspapers if relatives could not be reached.....I think my family, especially my grandmother would have rallied the family (a large one) to relocate the graves of her mother, aunt and grandparents.  I gave a presentation of our family history at our reunion a year ago and my generation was horrified at what we discovered about the cemetery."

  

Opinions on the travesty of Monument Cemetery ran to the other extreme as well:

"I understand that moving a cemetery for parking seems crass, but the world belongs to the living and the not-yet-living - and Temple [University] has been and remains the most-affordable, best-hope for higher Education in Philadelphia. Isn't that worth more than a decaying cemetery?"

Some people were upset that I wrote about the cemeteries in their neighborhoods in a sensationalistic way. It got peoples’ attention, though, didn’t it? I am sure it helped with public awareness and the need to restore, rehab, and care for what we have.

What’s on The Cemetery Traveler’s  event horizon?

So what is on The Cemetery Traveler’s event horizon for "Year Three" of the blog? Well, a few things.

• Publish a book of selections of essays from The Cemetery Traveler blog. I expect this to be available in about six months, with eBook versions on Nook  and Kindle. I have to thank the observant reader who commented on this photo a while back, “This photo screams ‘Book Cover’!”

• Pay closer attention to comments made and emails sent by my readers, as your feedback adds another dimension to my writing. That said,  I’ve not been prompt with my replies. I’ll do better – or at least the best I can with two-and-a-half year-old vying for my attention! 

• More travel! I plan to have a vendor table at the AGS (Association for Gravestone Studies) Conference in West Long Branch, New Jersey on June 22, 2012. Hope to become a member and interact with the conference attendees. I’m also planning to visit some of the historic cemeteries in Charlotte, North Carolina next month.

In Conclusion…

An advantage the living have over the dead:  we can go to sleep at the end of a long day, then wake up and do it all over again. So, shall I keep on writing? In the words of author/screenwriter S.J. Perelman, “To the fiery temperament, decision is consonant with action.” In other words, I intend to continue shooting off my mouth without thinking. Stay tuned – all shall be revealed.

Celebrate Arbor Day – Chop Down a Tree!

This past Saturday, I was part of a city tree-planting group of volunteers that planted ten new trees on our block in South Philadelphia. One was alongside my house. Later that afternoon, I helped a different group of volunteers chainsaw a cluster of wild trees that had grown around and were crowding out a mausoleum at Philadelphia’s Mount Moriah Cemetery. I didn’t really see the irony in this until I noticed on my calendar that Arbor Day (April 27, 2012), our national tree-planting holiday, was less than a week away!

Excavating mausoleum from arboreal prison

I arrived late at Mount Moriah that Saturday, due to my earlier planting commitment. One group of volunteers had just gone, while a half-dozen diehards continued the hard work. All the grasses and vines had been cleared from the right side of the structure, and several trees had been downed from the left side. Over the next few hours, we chainsawed about a half-dozen more trees, dragged them out of the thicket with a small tractor, and hacked all the branches off them (so they could later be chipped by a tree-cutting service).

I was amazed at the number of people in both groups – the cutters now, the planters earlier. The drive, dedication, and the amount of energy these people directed toward their goal was wonderful and infectious. Arbor Day, forward and reverse!

From the City of Philadelphia website:

Keep Philadelphia and your community beautiful, plant a tree.

Trees bring a multitude of benefits ranging from decreased air pollution, stormwater runoff and extreme temperature days to increased property values, carbon sequestration and quality of life.

Many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods lack adequate tree cover. GreenPlan calls for Philadelphia’s tree canopy to increase to 30 percent in every neighborhood by 2025. To support this goal, Greenworks Philadelphia sets a target of planting 300,000 trees by 2015. It’s an ambitious goal, but a goal we can strive for together as a City.

Trees in summer offer cover for spray-painting vandals

While on one hand it seems that the city is attempting to reach a place Carlos Casteneda only dreams about, it also sponsors a project to hack out an abandoned cemetery from its jungle confines. The former to promote life, the latter to, well, celebrate life.

Mt. Moriah Cemetery at sunset

Both endeavors had merit. One part of the city needs to be greener, the other, well, less green.  Now don’t get me wrong – I’m the world’s biggest fan of cemetery trees. They can add a certain je ne sais quoi to a photograph as a spooky compositional element that is hard to beat. However, Mount  Moriah Cemetery in Southwest Philly is simply a jungle. After thirty or more years of unrestricted florid overgrowth, the place cannot be enjoyed as it was meant to by its Victorian landscapers and designers.

As the cemetery has been abandoned by its legal owners, groups of concerned citizens have taken it upon themselves to thin out the thousands of random trees and keep the weeds and vines cut. It’s going to take a lot of work to repair the damage to the monuments and other structures that the trees have wrought, but first the trees must be removed.  Four hundred acres of wild vegetation is quite a challenge. The photos at right and at the top of this article are fairly common sights in the heavily-wooded sections of the cemetery.

Cut trees at Atkins mausoluem

Which is funny when you think about the overgrowth – when you try to purposely grow plants, they seem to just have a death wish. You try to keep that azalea alive or nurse the insect-ridden holly back to health and you swear they just want to die! You feel as though you’re just prolonging their agony, keeping them going by artificial means. For instance, I know I’ll be fertilizing and watering the new tree alongside my house for the next year, hoping the roots will take hold. However, there’s every possibility that it could just shrivel up and die. Worse yet, the jackass vandals who set a candle burning on the roof of my convertible may just rip the branches off this tree. As for the cemetery tree-clearing, there’s every possibility that once the mausoleums and monuments at Moriah are exposed, vandals may tag them with spray paint. All you can do is the best you can do.

Pulling cut trees with tractor and chains

What may save the cemetery, however, is the simple fact that more people are spending time there. If vandals see other people, they’re less likely to commit criminal acts. Also, fewer trees mean less cover for the criminal element (see my previous blogs listed at the end of this article for further reading), so thinning out the trees may result in less defacement and damage.

From the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery website:

Next Mount Moriah Volunteer Cleanup – May 19, 2012

Join the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery on May 19th from 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM for a cleanup event at the cemetery. Friends, relatives, historians and anyone interested in Mount Moriah Cemetery are asked to meet at the Yeadon entrance to the cemetery on Cobbs Creek Parkway starting at 8:00 AM.

Further Reading (Mount Moriah blog postings by Ed Snyder):

Beginning to Die - The Strange State of Mt. Moriah Cemetery

No One Hears an Abandoned Cemetery Scream

Mount Moriah Cemetery, on the Cusp

Pit Bulls, Deer Ticks, and Poison Ivy – The Allure of the Abandoned Cemetery

Mt.Moriah Cemetery Rising from the Dead?

Wingless Angels

I had a lovely interaction with one of my Facebook readers last week. She saw the serene, snowy image above after I had posted it on Facebook and recognized it as the statue at her family plot – the statue her great grandfather had sculpted around the 1930s!

Here’s part of her original message:

"Dear Ed, I recently Googled statues located in Holy Cross Cemetery [Yeadon, PA,  on the southwest border of Philadelphia] …. One image completely stunned me. It was a partial view of a large stone angel taken in winter, seen here. I am pretty sure this is my family's angel statue - she is leaning on her arm reading a book - that my great grandfather sculpted for the family plot over 80 years ago. How wonderful to see this image included in your photos. Thank you."

The writer’s description of the “large stone angel “ didn’t quite fit the photograph - the stone angel on the left side of the image is not really that large. I replied to her that the figure to the right is not an angel. 

Her reply was rather interesting:

"She isn't really an angel as she doesn't have wings but we have always called her that. She is really a mourning lady sitting down with her head in her hand reading a book. It was sculpted over 80 years ago. She is over our large family plot that actually holds 8 to 12 spots. Thanks so much for your beautiful work!"

I've heard people refer to wingless figures as angels before. In fact, the Warner Memorial (shown here) at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia is usually described as the angel of death (wingless woman at left) releasing the soul of the deceased to the heavens.

Warner Memorial, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia

Initially I asked the writer if her great grandfather had been a local sculptor, to which she replied:

"My great grandfather came from Italy in the late 1800's and he worked in all types of stone as a mason and sculptor. He worked on statues for St. Rita's and St. Monica Churches in South Philly and monuments for cemeteries. He died in 1939. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly which sculptures they are but I've come across some very old pencil sketches from my great grandfather, that my dad had rolled up in a closet, and they look like planned architectural features you see on churches. We may be able to track down some of those features on those churches and match them to the sketches."

I enjoyed being part of this story, albeit in such a small way. I offered to send her a copy of the photograph, and she was very appreciative, adding, “your beautiful work takes me to so many cemeteries I may never get to.” Its amazing how rewarding cemetery photography can be when others find such meaning in your work.

What do you want on YOUR tombstone?

Pizza commercials aside, ten years ago I thought it unnecessary for me to have a tombstone, or a grave marker of any sort. Kind of selfish of me, I suppose, since I spend so much time photographing, reading, and researching other people's tombstones! I just figured, cremate me and throw my ashes to the winds (or better yet, pour them in the gas tanks of cars owned by people who really pissed me off in life!).

I’d also felt that there was a bit of vanity associated with cemetery memorials, especially the gaudy mausoleums. Would I mmortalize myself in stained glass, for instance? I’m a lot of things, but vain isn’t one of them. However, I just finished reading Douglas Keister’s novel, Autumn in Summer, and I now am thinking that maybe I would like a tombstone.

Available from Amazon

Keister is a photographer of cemetery monuments, who happens to also write eloquently and prolifically about them. In fact he has thirty-nine books to his credit! His glossy coffee-table book, Going Out in Style catalyzed my interest in photographing cemetery objects about a decade ago. In his current book, a mystery novel,

Keister incorporates many of the things he's learned about cemeteries in his travels. It's quite interesting reading for the taphophile.

There’s an interlude in the narrative of Autumn in Summer where the protagonist states to a cemetery worker how he doesn’t want a tombstone when he dies. The worker tells him that while it doesn't matter whether you get cremated or buried:

"You need to leave your name behind somewhere. Cemetery's just a spot where you're better assured permanency. While there might not be much left of your physical remains, seeing your name on a piece of stone gives your descendants a better sense of who they are. We need to leave our name somewhere. People need to come to a place to remember us, to connect to us, to connect to themselves, to connect to the past and the future... People come thousands of miles just to see a name, to make that connection."

Author with Friend

I am reminded of the situation involving my research on the discarded tombstones from Philadelphia’s Monument Cemetery. My writing has inadvertently put me in touch with many people who are looking for a trace of their ancestors. When the cemetery was condemned and demolished in 1956, thousands of bodies were removed and reburied in mass graves in a suburban cemetery (Lawnview Cemetery in the Rockledge section of the city), without so much as a plaque indicating their presence. Their thousands of headstones were dumped into the Delaware River, to be used as a foundation for the Betsy Ross Bridge. So for people looking for physical traces of their ancestors, there are none to be found. I guess I don't want this to happen to me.

So I thank Mr. Keister  for allowing me to think of headstones in a different way. As he puts it, a mechanism that will allow me to leave a tangible trace of my existence so that loved ones, friends, and curiosity seekers have a place to land when they want to think about either me or their own mortality.

So what would I like on my tombstone? Keister says,"You only get one chance to make a last impression." Maybe I'd like some weird sort of statue? Or a photo of myself on a simple stone? How about an epitaph? Maybe some pithy phrase or some strange symbols I’ll  make up just to mess with people’s heads? Something like this, perhaps:

Given my penchant for trespassing, maybe an appropriate engraving for me would be:

Ed Snyder  1958 - ____

“Forgiveness is easier to get than permission.”

References and Further Reading:
Douglas Keister on Facebook

Available from Amazon

Passover and Gladwyne's Abandoned Jewish Cemetery

Where flesh is doomed to rot to naught
And worms feast on their limbs,
I find myself amidst the graves
forgotten in Gladwyne

(I took liberties with the poem Where Flew His Soul? by Charles Sudbury, 1826)

Cemetery Entrance

Over the past five years, I’d heard about an abandoned Jewish graveyard somewhere in the woods of Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. Gladwyne itself is mostly woods, with million-dollar homes sprinkled throughout for good measure. It’s a suburban community in Montgomery County on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Your chances of finding this cemetery without someone showing you are completely nil.

Near entrance, tennis court in background

A friend of mine located it several years ago, and was going to show it to me, but we never got around to it. Then last week, Frank, my fellow cemetery traveler, was shown the cemetery by a friend. Frank, in turn, graciously gave me directions. It turns out that if you drive up the private driveway of #135 Conshohocken State Road, and veer to the left instead of driving up to the house, you drive right to the crumbling stone pillars flanking the entrance to the cemetery. In fact, from the driveway you can see old marble tombstones through the fence of an old tennis court. If you go, do show respect for the neighbors. 

Near entrance, home in back

Having no public access and without being visible from the road, this creepy old cemetery has only been seen by its immediate neighbors and occasional volunteer clean-up groups over the years (the years that span the 1920s to the present, i.e., since it appears that the last burials were in the 1920s).

Walking through this place is a MUST for any cemetery explorer – you may be appalled, afraid, amazed, or desire to use the location for your next zombie movie. You walk into the place and it starts off quaint - the tilted headstones, the  lone cradle graves. As you walk further through the weeds, you begin to see small clusters of graves, surrounded by rusty decorative fencing. Most of the fencing has fallen to the ground and is waiting for you to trip over.

About a hundred feet past the entrance you see where the main cemetery begins in earnest. Hebrew writing all over the stones (most of which are upright thanks to volunteer preservationists through the years) coexists with English words – “Our Dear Father,” “Wife,” etc. Dates range from the mid−1800s to about the 1920s. The cemetery was established in 1860 and became inactive around 1930. Apparently, it was forgotten until the late 1980s.

Pickers and rusty fence, protecting headstones

The ground slopes gently away as you get further into the woods. Family plots can be seen scattered about, slowly being taken over by picker patches. In a few weeks this place will be a forest again, impassable and unrecognizable as a formal burial ground (fall and winter are the best times to explore abandoned cemeteries, due to foliage growth). The odd thing here – well, let me stop myself – there are many odd things here, but very strangely, there are expensive houses and private land surrounding this old cemetery. As I’ve said, there is no public access!

Looking downhill into the vast wooded cemetery

So you need to trespass to get here, sort of. State laws vary on the matter but in some states, you are well within your legal rights to walk or drive across private property to visit an isolated cemetery! Um, I hadn’t actually checked the law in Pennsylvania before I visited, having gotten a bit carried away by my sense of adventure! Anyway, all nineteen acres (or so I’ve read) of this place are bordered by private property, VERY private, and VERY expensive property! Driving through this area reminded me of those gated estates in the Hollywood Hills. 

Sometime in the early 1990s I was in LA, and took the car tour of the movie stars’ homes. My Mom had always been a fan of Elizabeth Taylor, so I went in search of her home. Liz Taylor’s estate in the Mount Olympus section of Beverly Hills was surrounded by a hedgerow of small violet flowers. I parked my rental car, got out, and picked one of them for my Mom. Almost the instant I popped it into a film canister, helicopters appeared overhead, stationary in the sky, postured in a very threatening formation! Gladwyne doesn’t have such tight security, but then Liz Taylor never lived here.

Spiral vines and rusty fencing

As you continue walking further into the graveyard, the clusters of white marble headstones become more frequent, peeking out from behind termite-eaten fallen trees. Unimaginably thick vines curl up the live trees, strangling them and eventually pulling them to the ground. There are some crumbling stone burial crypts about five feet high, which are situated near the peak of a hill. As you look down the hill, the vastness of this decrepit cemetery stuns you! Nineteen acres! Through the trees, you can see rows upon rows of closely set cradle graves (not children's graves, just a style of stonework that looks like a cradle), separated in sections by rusty fencing.

"Cradle" style graves

The tangles of pickers and weeds were already advancing in this early Spring - live things coming out of the ground to hide all the dead things. The rows of graves disappear into the distance, an estimated 1200 of them. The woods are gray and misty, affording an occasional glimpse of a pump house or an old log cabin (circa 1698) on the facing hillside. Not a place you want to be on Halloween night, or even on a bright spring day, for that matter. The way the rows of graves go on and on, ever downhill, reminded me of something much more Eastern European than American. Many of the deceased must have been original immigrants to America.

Toward bottom of hill, looking across at log cabin

Note angel and Hebrew script on stone

Stubs of rusted iron posts delineate what once were distinct sections of the cemetery. Several family plots are marked with tubular cast iron fencing with the decorative cherub centerpiece commonly seem in cemeteries around Philadelphia. The odd thing is that you seldom see angels in Jewish cemeteries. (This is not because Jews don’t believe in angels – angels appear in the Hebrew Scriptures. it’s just that throughout Jewish history there’s been an avoidance to depict the human form in funerary ornamentation.)

The history of this place is not well-documented. The fragments of supposed fact come from letters and oral recollections. "Har Ha Zetim Cemetery", aka Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery and "Mount of Olives," was supposedly established in 1860, and served the poor Jewish population of Philadelphia and Norristown until the 1920s. No doubt some of the the people interred here emigrated from Russia during the pogrom in 1881. The fact that this exodus occurred on Passover of that year oddly coincides with my writing this blog on the eve of Passover, 2012.

How Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery came to be abandoned is anyone’s guess. Mine happens to be that the congregation that established it eventually dissolved, leaving the cemetery to molder. This happened to the B’nai Israel Cemetery in West Philadelphia. No reason for the town to condemn Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery as a public nuisance or force anyone to clean it up as it isn’t, well, public. In 1999 Judge Stanely Ott of the Court of Common Pleas, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Orphans' Court Division, settled litigation over the disposition of this cemetery. Beth David Reform Congregation in Gladwyne became the official owner. So Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery is no longer formerly abandoned, just officially inactive.

In his book Old Weird America, writer Greil Marcus proposes a metaphorical version of America, contained inside the contemporary United States. “This alternative America at once inspires and explains the strangeness of our daily lives.” Marcus refers to a land of myth, violence and transcendence (Gibson, 2009). Abandoned cemeteries in general provide us with a metaphorical version of America – back then something happened. We’ve lost track of what it was, but without a doubt it has influenced who we are today. We may want to forget about it, or we may be embarrassed by it, but these old graveyards are a metaphor for our all-too-disposable history, a history we seem to have traded for technological advance.

Walking through Gladwyne's Abandoned Jewish Cemetery is not like finding a lonely outcropping of headstones in a farmer’s field somewhere – this was a COMMUNITY! A community of ancestors, now lost to the ages. But as you walk through the lanes of graves, the presence of all these people is alive in the air, they were REAL. They lived. They had rites, manners, and customs that were as real to them as ours are to us.

When I had emerged from my latest rabbit hole dive into yet another abandoned cemetery, I inadvertently left my camera tripod behind. What can I say – the place was a photographer’s paradise, so distractions were legion. A few days later I was doing a photo shoot in another abandoned cemetery, and someone needed a tripod. I went back to my car and realized at that point I had left the tripod in Gladwyne. So one afternoon a few days later, I made the trip back. This time, it was sunny, so I got better pictures. The tripod was right where I had left it. I’m sure the place gets very little traffic. Besides, Gladwyne's crime rate is probably as close to zero as you can get. Unlike the neighborhoods in which most abandoned graveyards are found, this is one where you can leave your car doors unlocked.

If You Go:

135 Conshohocken State Road (Route 23), Gladwyne, PA. The driveway is on the left as you drive down the hill. Head up the driveway as it takes a sharp swing to the left away from the house. Cemetery entrance is just ahead on the right, past the tennis court. There is an enormous body of state law governing access to burial grounds surrounded by private property. Pennsylvania allows access if you have relatives buried there.While there is nothing really stopping you from saying you are visiting relatives, please show respect for the nearby property owners, as well as the dead.

References and Further Reading:

“Abandoned Jewish Cemeteries “ blog by Ed Snyder

International Jewish Cemetery Project

lowermerionhistory.org

Lost Jewish Cemetery of Gladwyne (photos)
The Old, Weird America (L.A. Times article)
Pennsylvania Laws Regarding Burial Practices and Cemeteries

The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia 
Grave Matters - The Ancient Rites of the Graveyard

Old Weird America, by Greil Marcus

Hubert’s Freaks, by Gregory Gibson