The Art and Architecture of Death
A good stock Pietà marks the grave of a soldier who died just a month and a half before the end of the First World War. The rustic stone with scroll that serves as a base does not match very well, and may have ben a replacement after the monument was damaged.
Two of these mass-produced iron crucifixes from the 1880s can be found in St. Peter’s Cemetery [Correction: After another walk through the cemetery, we have found at least four]. Their weakness as monuments is that the individualized letters fall off, though “Hier ruhet” is molded in the metal and perfectly legible. Fortunately there are other Amrheins buried in the same plot with legible stone monuments, so we can be confident that the letters AMR---I- represent AMRHEIN. The first name (-ACK-B) is probably Jackob. The birth and death dates are also illegible, though we can make out the decade of death as 188-.
The epitaph is perfectly legible, because it is cut in a stone base:
Ruhe sanft in deiner Gruft
bis dich Jesus wieder ruft.
Rest softly in your grave
till Jesus calls you again.
Simple modernist elegance enlivened by bronze doors and decorative etching around the doorframe.
This is an absolutely immense pointy thing; one site claims it’s a hundred feet tall. That is surprising enough in a little German Catholic cemetery in the middle of a city neighborhood, but the bigger surprise is that nobody is buried here. According to this page, the Winter Bros., Bavarian immigrants who founded a successful brewery on the South Side, bought this plot in 1889 and put up this towering obelisk, and then went and died somewhere else. Each of the three brothers has his name inscribed on one side of the obelisk: Michael, Wolfgang, and Alois.
Louis Knoepp died in 1895 at the age of 40, and either he had already made enough of a fortune that this expense seemed appropriate to his heirs, or he came from a family with plenty of money already. The amateurish allegorical wreath-bearing statue on top suggests a client with more money than taste, but if the message to be delivered was that Louis Knoepp was the richest man in the cemetery, then the message has been delivered. Old Pa Pitt suspects that this monument was chosen from a monument dealer’s illustrated catalogue, forcing the monument dealer to come up with a monument he had never actually expected to have to build for anyone.
A particularly fine shrouded-urn monument, with the U. S. Steel Tower in the distance.
It appears that the Rohrkastes had six children, all of whom died before their father, though half lived into adulthood.
A massive and ostentatious pile of classicism, with a curious florid R for the name Reinhold that ought to look out of place but actually harmonizes very well. It is pleasing to note that as late as 1987 the Reinholds had the money and the persistence to procure a stone matching the earlier ones in the plot.
Two identical obelisks side by side suggest that the families were related, or associated in some other way. The Berg obelisk probably dates from the late nineteenth century; perhaps 1886, when the cemetery opened, since the oldest Berg stone here is from 1876, which means that it would have been moved from the cemetery’s previous location in Troy Hill. The Etzel obelisk was probably put up at the same time, though Father Pitt was unable to find any individual Etzel stones as old as the obelisk obviously is. The style of these obelisks is restrained, with simple bases enlivened by classical foliage ornament.
A cross of lilies, making a fine symbol of Jesus’ redemptive death (the cross) and resurrection (the lilies). It was probably put up about 1918, when Hermann Laub was buried in this plot.
A big urn on a towering shaft seems like a mixed metaphor, but it certainly makes the Kloman plot easy to find. It was probably put up in about 1879, when the first Kloman buried here died. There is generous space on the base for inscriptions, but nothing has ever been inscribed.