Everyone should know by now that I love Troy and try to promote it whenever I can, but imagine my surprise (and pleasure) to discover Troy featured prominently in not one, but TWO articles in yesterday's
New York Times.
Major kudos and props to our friend and tireless promoter of historic
Oakwood Cemetery, Theresa Page, President of the Troy Cemetery Association, and Amy Klein, Executive Director of
Capital District Community Gardens. They are among the many people who are working hard to improve the City of Troy and keep things moving forward.
Here are the articles:
In Need of Income, Cemeteries Are Seeking Breathing ClienteleBy Patricia Leigh Brown; photography by R.J. Mickelson.
05/25/07
[NB: Online version includes a "
Graveyard Travels" slide show obviously not included in the print version]
PHILADELPHIA — The dinner was first-class, with butlers serving hors d’oeuvres and the strains of “Blue Danube” tastefully muffling the festive din. This nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard an ill-fated ocean liner was the culmination of Titanic Day at Laurel Hill Cemetery, one of a growing number of historic cemeteries to rebrand themselves as destination necropolises for weekend tourists.
Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar. Laurel Hill, the resting place of six Titanic victims, promotes itself as an “underground museum.” The sold-out Titanic dinner, including a tour of mausoleums, joined the “Dead White Republicans” tour (“the city’s power brokers, in all their glory and in all their shame”), the “Birding Among the Buried” tour, and “Sinners, Scandals and Suicides,” including a visit to the grave of “a South Philly gangster who got whacked when he tried to infiltrate the Schuylkill County numbers racket.”
As Americans choose cremation in record numbers, Victorian cemeteries like Laurel Hill and Green-Wood in Brooklyn are repositioning themselves for the afterlife: their own. Repositories of architectural and sculptural treasures, like Tiffany windows and weeping marble maidens atop tombs, the cemeteries face dwindling endowments, years of vandalism and neglect, shrinking space for new arrivals and a society that, until recently, collectively distanced itself from their meandering byways.
Although their individual circumstances vary — Green-Wood in Brooklyn, a newly crowned National Historic Landmark, has space for two more years of in-ground burial, while Laurel Hill is virtually full — what they share is a daunting number of tombs in need of repair. Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the final home of Whitneys, a Woolworth, Jay Gould and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, has 95,000 grave sites.
Only 9,000 have endowments, said Susan Olsen, the executive director of the Friends of Woodlawn. “You’re a conservator,” Ms. Olsen said. “You can’t have someone up there with a bottle of Windex cleaning a Tiffany window.”
The new cemetery tourism — a subterranean version of the History Channel — is also a means of developing brand loyalty in the wake of what Joseph Dispenza, president of the historic Forest Lawn in Buffalo, calls a “diminishing customer base.”
Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, Calif., a columbarium designed by Julia Morgan, architect of San Simeon, recently started “Jazz at the Chimes” concerts to reach culture enthusiasts who might be potential customers.
Some cemeteries are betting on infotainment. At Heritage Day last weekend at the 200-year-old Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a 70-piece marching band serenaded the grave of John Philip Sousa, and dog owners held a parade for dogs dressed as historical cemetery personages, including a Union soldier.
A decade ago, prostitutes and packs of wild dogs populated the city’s oldest burial ground, which has monuments designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, designer of the Capitol. Then the preservation association began courting dog owners. Today, the 33-acre cemetery serves as a historical dog park where dogs run in Elysian fields, free to commune with the headstones. Owners pay $125 a year for the privilege, plus $40 a dog — bringing in $80,000 so far. In many ways, it is a throwback to the days of old, when then-rural cemeteries like Green-Wood and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass. (1831), rivaled Niagara Falls as romantic tourist destinations. These “gardens of graves” were settings for Sunday picnics and a precursor to Central Park and other great public spaces.
Like many vintage cemeteries, Laurel Hill languished for years in a struggling urban neighborhood, as potential customers drifted to the suburbs. Though the cemetery has a $17 million endowment, most of that is earmarked for specific family tombs and falls woefully short of what is needed for maintenance. “After 170 years, people lose track” of their loved ones, said Ross L. Mitchell, the executive director.
And with only 1 percent of its 78 acres available for new burial, cemetery officials are trying to think of creative ways to mine its distinctive personality. The Titanic tour was the brainchild of J. Joseph Edgette, a professor at nearby Widener University who is tracking the graves of Titanic victims and plans to document all 2,200. “We’re rebranding ourselves as a heritage tourism destination,” Mr. Mitchell said.
For Jason Crabtree, a 33-year-old software writer, and his wife, Melissa, 29, this storied rural resting place, established in 1836, offered “a cross-section of humanity you don’t usually see,” said Mr. Crabtree, explaining the couple’s predilection for weekend cemetery visits.
At a daffodil brunch in April at the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y., omelet chefs whisked eggs amid Siena marble walls and soaring Tiffany windows, in the Gardner Earl Memorial Chapel and Crematorium. The 1848 cemetery has burial space for the next 200 years and an annual operating deficit of more than $100,000, according to Theresa Page, president of the board of trustees.
Its preservation issues are dire: volunteers have been clearing brush that made about 10,000 graves invisible. The grave site of Samuel Wilson, the man behind “Uncle Sam,” America’s national symbol, has been inaccessible for years, since 125-year-old water pipes burst beneath the roads. The cemetery has asked Congress for $1.7 million for reconstruction.
To raise its profile and money, Oakwood will stage a Renaissance fair this summer, with jousting matches among knights in shining armor. It was inspired by a medieval-style wedding there, for which the groom made his own armor.
“We want them to think, ‘Wow, I think I’d like to spend my eternity here,’ ” Ms. Page said of efforts to lure visitors. “It’s a way of saying, ‘We would love you to stay with us permanently.’ ”
Certain cemeteries, like Père-Lachaise in Paris, Arlington National Cemetery in Washington and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, have always had celebrity cachet. But the past decade has seen a deliberate marketing of cultural status. At the 175-year-old Mount Auburn, it has meant lectures on the warbler migration by the Massachusetts Audubon Society; at Spring Grove in Cincinnati, tourists in electric trams ride past the grave of Salmon P. Chase, the founder of the Internal Revenue Service (they usually boo).
Forest Lawn in Buffalo spent $1.2 million to erect the Blue Sky mausoleum, a spare design by Frank Lloyd Wright, with 24 crypts from $125,000 to $300,000. Each crypt-owner will receive a Steuben glass sculpture of their eternal home-in-waiting. “It’s about exclusivity,” Mr. Dispenza of Forest Lawn said. “It’s about being one of the 24.”
Gary Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University and the author of “Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in the 20th Century” (Oxford University Press, 2003), says there is “a sense in which, like sex, death sells.” But he also sees cemetery tourism as a chance for civic engagement. The mobility of society and the growth of the death care industry have served to isolate these historically significant places from the mainstream, Mr. Laderman said.
That attitude may be shifting. Laurel Hill, for example, was awarded a $97,000 grant to provide grief counseling for inner-city children grappling with the effects of gun violence.
Of course, some think that cemeteries are sacred spaces, and that Halloween flashlight tours and historical re-enactors jumping out from behind tombs crosses the line in taste.
A 2005 fund-raising calendar for Oakwood Cemetery in Troy — inspired by the movie “Calendar Girls” and featuring socialites who appeared to be naked — was a tad too risqué to repeat, some thought. After objections, Green-Wood scuttled plans to show horror films.
“The cemetery doesn’t have an obligation to entertain,” said Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and writer in Michigan.
Preservationists say desperate times require desperate measures. And “Birding Among the Buried” brings people in, if only for a look.
“The people who built Laurel Hill wanted these monuments to be seen,” said Mr. Mitchell of Laurel Hill. “If we do nothing, isn’t that the ultimate disrespect?”
Troy Journal: Off the Back Of a Truck, And HealthyBy Dennis Gaffney
05/25/07
For the past month, Eric J. Krans has been driving a truck through the heart of this old industrial city, delivering much of what has vanished from the store shelves here over the past half-century — fresh produce, from lettuce, carrots and collard greens to mangoes, plantains and pineapple.
“There’s the peaches everyone was wanting,” said Carolyn Moses, 64, the first person to climb into the box truck one recent afternoon, as she poked around the wooden crates. Then she pulled open a refrigerated case and shouted to no one in particular, “Tomatoes are 79 cents a pound, everyone.”
It is a new service, begun by a nonprofit organization, to promote healthier eating.
What would seem to be a pretty mundane find by most shoppers’ standards is anything but in downtown Troy and other poor urban neighborhoods in New York State where there are no supermarkets.
In Troy, about 10 miles north of Albany, for example, supermarkets are clustered on the outskirts, where the city begins to transform into suburbs.
According to an informal survey in 2005 by the Capital District Community Gardens, a nonprofit agency, not one of the seven urban neighborhoods in Troy and in nearby Schenectady and Albany that the Veggie Mobile serves had a supermarket within four miles.
That is why the organization established the Veggie Mobile, which cruises the streets on a rotating schedule three days a week, selling freshly grown local produce. On one additional day, it offers samples and gives away fresh fruit and vegetables, hoping to get people to expand their food choices.
“We’re trying to give people in inner-city neighborhoods access to affordable fresh produce,” said Amy Klein, executive director of the community gardens.
Ms. Klein said she got the idea for the Veggie Mobile several years ago, after reading about a truck known as the People’s Grocery that served healthy foods in poor neighborhoods in West Oakland, Calif.
“I thought, ‘We can do that with vegetables,’ ” she said, “because we’re all about vegetables here.”
She said the Veggie Mobile was a natural extension of the work done by her organization, which has attracted 3,000 families to grow fruits and vegetables in 46 community gardens in the Albany area.
Impressed by the notion, the State Department of Health provided a $500,000 grant over five years.
As the Veggie Mobile drives through downtown Troy to its first stop, it passes a natural-foods store, a misnomer, in Mr. Krans’s opinion. “They sell dried fruits, nuts and supplements,” he says. “But fresh produce they do not have.” And no supermarket.
Stephen Matthews, an associate professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University who studies food landscapes, says sociologists call such places, whether urban or rural, “food deserts,” where, if there are any food stores, they are corner groceries, where produce is more expensive or nonexistent.
Instead, Dr. Matthews said, residents of poor urban areas are surrounded by fast food restaurants, whose fare he said contributes to obesity and a host of other health problems.
Ms. Klein of the community gardens said: “As a nation, we’re concerned with obesity, heart disease, diabetes. These health issues are tied to healthy eating. And we know our consumption of fruits and vegetables isn’t what it needs to be.”
As the Veggie Mobile pulled up to one of its scheduled stops, John F. Kennedy Towers, a housing development for the elderly, “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra blared from speakers mounted on the front.
Like a grandson, Mr. Krans escorted people up the ramp into the truck and back down again, offering to carry their bags.
In the first week, Ms. Klein said, there were about 50 customers a week, but in just a month the total number has grown to 400 a week, far beyond expectations.
“It’s getting crazier every time we do this,” Mr. Krans said. “Friends tell friends, neighbors tell neighbors.”
Since the initial run, the selection of produce has been expanded in response to customers’ requests.
Last week, basil, pineapple, oranges, strawberries, mangoes and limes complemented the usual array of offerings.
The plan is to sell produce from local farmers when it becomes available next month.
“We want to contribute to the local farm economy,” Ms. Klein said.
Many Kennedy Towers residents remember when bread and milk trucks, as well as vegetable merchants, cruised the streets, 50 and 60 years ago. “This is the best thing that has happened at Kennedy Towers,” said Lea Allen, 63. “Everything is nice and fresh and reasonable.”
The nearest grocery, just across the street, has a sign above the door: “Groceries, Hot Food, Subs, Beer, Candy and Cigarettes.” But it sells no fresh produce.
After an hour at Kennedy Towers, Mr. Krans headed for the second stop of the afternoon, the parking lot of Carroll Hill Elementary School in South Troy, where nearly two-thirds of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.
“A lot of parents here don’t have automobiles to get to a large grocery store or a farmer’s market,” said Casey Parker, the school’s principal.
The first week the Veggie Mobile parked at Carroll Hill, a neighborhood resident, Lori Filuta, predicted that children would be drawn to it as if it were stocked with ice cream.
“The parents work,” Ms. Filuta said. “But you’ll see. The kids will be here buying fruit.”
Soon, two regulars, Nick Mariano and Matthew Murray, both 12, showed up with enough change for a half-dozen oranges, which they wasted no time peeling and eating.
Aimie Thorsey, the director of Hope 7, an after-school program at Carroll Hill, said she came each week with a dozen or so children who brought spare change from home.
“Each of them usually leaves with an apple or a banana,” Ms. Thorsey said. One week, “kiwi was a big hit.”
Nine-year-old Billy recently tried his first mango. “I liked it better than a banana,” he said.
Ms. Klein is pleased. “Any way we can break down barriers to healthier foods,” she said, “aids people on their way to healthier lifestyles.”
