The Art and Architecture of Death
A rural cemetery on rolling hills in Carrick, with many interesting mausoleums and monuments.
The mausoleum and statue are both stock items, but good ones, although the mausoleum does give the impression of having been assembled from a kit of mass-produced parts.
This mausoleum and its stone mourner are doubtless both standard catalogue items. But they are picturesque, and much more so because of the deep blackness of the stone. Most stone buildings in Pittsburgh used to look like this, but few of them have escaped cleaning.
The other thing that makes the mausoleum stand out, of course, is the delightful name “Sunshine” over the door.
A more artistic stump than usual, with a particularly well-done inscription.
An unusual Romanesque design, though with a little point at the top of the arch to suggest the Gothic in case you don’t like Romanesque.
A simple marble obelisk remembering William Rankin, who died in 1874. From the style, we would guess that the obelisk was erected about then.
A marble monument in what we might call folk-romantic style. The recording angel has been eroded by pollution and time, but it does not look as though it was ever a very skillful carving, Nevertheless, the whole effect of the monument is very pleasing.
The epitaph (a poem commonly found on monuments of the era) reads:
Dear mother, rest in quiet sleep,
While friends in sorrow o’er thee weep,
And here their heartfelt offerings bring
And near thy grave thy requiem sing.
A plain mausoleum of rusticated stone, this one is exceptional in the South Side Cemetery for retaining its bronze doors; almost all the other mausoleums in the cemetery are now missing their doors, which can be sold as scrap by thieves to dealers who apparently never wonder why someone would happen to be carrying a large ornate door on the back of his truck. There is even a bit of almost-intact stained glass in the back.
Father Pitt hopes the Wilder family (who are doubtless kind and indulgent people) will forgive him for saying that this is without a doubt the ugliest mausoleum in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. It looks like a thing built by a contractor who had never built, or perhaps even seen, a mausoleum before, and thought of it as a sort of garage for coffins. But it is distinctive. There is nothing else in the South Side Cemetery that looks remotely like it; and, since it occupies a prominent plot at the intersection of two drives in the cemetery, there is no missing it.
