Pittsburgh Cemeteries

A large rustic mausoleum with medievalish columns. Like most mausoleums in this cemetery, it has lost its bronze doors, but unlike the others it has not been closed off with concrete blocks. It probably provides shelter for occasional homeless guests, and if old Pa Pitt had a mausoleum he would approve of that use.

An elegantly simple cube with rusticated stone blocks to add texture and shading. Unlike most of the mausoleums in this cemetery, this one has kept its bronze doors. One wonders whether the designer intended the shallow stepped roof as a subtle recollection of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

A very simple mausoleum whose visual interest comes mostly from the rusticated blocks, and their contrast with the finished doorframe.

A simple rustic mausoleum, probably a stock model, immaculately kept, like everything in the West View Cemetery.

A Doric mausoleum distinguished by its rusticated stone everywhere but the columns.

An almost cartoonishly bulky and substantial rustic mausoleum, missing its bronze doors, which have been replaced by ugly concrete blocks. We can imagine that it must have looked much more inviting with artistic bronze doors and flower arrangements dripping over the edges of the urns.

This is the only mausoleum in the cemetery, a typical small rusticated-stone mausoleum. Originally it would have had bronze doors, but those are usually stolen from an unguarded cemetery and sold to scrap dealers who obviously have no idea where two men with a pickup truck might have got a large door-shaped chunk of bronze.

In-ground burial vaults like this had gone out of fashion in most of our cemeteries by the late nineteenth century, but there are two later ones in the Highwood Cemetery. This one, with its rustic stone, is indescribably picturesque and looks like a relic of some vanished ancient culture, but it probably dates from about 1880.