Pittsburgh Cemeteries

It is hard to pick a name for this style: it is almost machine-age modern, and it is both romantic and modernist in its deliberate break from any recognizable style of the past. The etched floral decorations soften what might otherwise be a forbiddingly severe composition.

A simple but elegant Ionic mausoleum, seen here with the much more extravagant Brown pyramid in the background.

A simplified Doric mausoleum without entablature or any of the usual fiddly bits. It dates from 1885, but one could be forgiven for supposing it a twentieth-century modernist’s interpretation of classical style.

Two women in the Boyd family were given these bed-like romantic graves; the one for Irene Boyd is grander and more ornate, but this one is perhaps in better taste.

This glorious creation is what happens when monument makers design monuments the way illustrators imagine them: a very romantic interpretation of classical forms, including stylized Ionic capitals, swags, a shrouded urn, and classical foliage. Unfortunately the inscriptions have eroded into illegibility, but in certain lights some of the burial dates seem to be from the 1860s.

The variation in colors is mostly the result of using two different cameras.

A rich-looking Ionic façade with a Victorian profusion of details, including rusticated stone blocks. It seems to have been a stock model; an exact duplicate was built for the Wilson family in the Union Dale Cemetery.

A particularly florid example of the romantic style that was popular in the middle 1800s. In its current state, it does not seem to have any dates for Irene Boyd: the name “Boyd” is on the back, and the name “Irene” on the front, with the rest of the stone given over to decorative elements. The footstone remembers a child, A. E. Boyd, who was born in 1855 and died in 1872.

Inscription on the footstone.

The back of the headstone.