”Let`s go find Julius. We can`t leave till we find him,” insists the indefatigable Joan Pomaranc, who is leading this search party. ”I know he`s right around here.
”It`s like a game. It`s not easy. He`s so unpretentious. He`s practically hidden by bushes.”
And so, in search of the stand of evergreens behind which Julius lies, Pomaranc circles past Crown and Kirk and the Foremans, Oscar and Edwin. Past Hirsch, Hirsch & Levi. Then again slowly: Crown, Kirk, Foreman, Foreman, Hirsch, Hirsch & Levi. Then again.
Never mind that the shadows grow long and the wristwatch ticks toward half past 4, when the front gates swing shut and the search party might have to ponder spending the night among the perpetually asleep.
”You really have to see Julius,” says Pomaranc, refusing to pack it in. ”I know he`s gotta be around here.”
Pomaranc has a point. Julius, as in Rosenwald-the big-time philanthropist with the small-time ego, the turn-of-the-century Chicagoan who turned the Sears watch-repair business into the United States` largest retailer, mail-order or otherwise, Sears, Roebuck & Co.-has been in the same spot since 1932. That`s when he died. And was buried.
The playing field for this everlasting game is Rosehill Cemetery, the 330-acre silent city that stretches from Ravenswood Avenue on the east to Western Avenue on the west, and from Berwyn Avenue on the south to Peterson Avenue on the north in the Ravenswood neighborhood. The population here is 185,000 and counting. Always counting.
Pomaranc, assistant to the director of the city`s Commission on Chicago Landmarks, is just wrapping up the research and writing of self-guided tours for the three historic Chicago cemeteries to be included in the American Institute of Architects` upcoming guidebook to the city.
A joint project of the institute`s Chicago chapter, the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois and the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the book is expected to be by far the most complete architectural guide to the city, covering not just landmark buildings but the ”quote, unquote ordinary buildings that make up every neighborhood. It will cover a much greater area, and much greater variety of the city than any previous guide,” says Alice Sinkevitch, editor of the American Institute of Architects guidebook. It fills an empty spot on the municipal bookshelf that, until now, has been
”completely embarrassing,” says Pomaranc.
The book is slated for publication in May of 1993, just in time for the centennial celebration of the World`s Columbian Exposition, when an unprecendented number of architects, designers and urban planners from around the world will be pouring into town for the simultaneous conventions of the American Institute of Architects, the World Congress of the Union
Internationale des Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Planning Association.
Until last spring, when the Chicago AIA`s editorial committee was divvying up assignments for the guide, Pomaranc was your basic history buff with no particular penchant for perpetual resting grounds.
She`d done her share of trekking through graveyards. She spent a whole day once vainly searching Lower Manhattan for an obscure Jewish burial ground. And back in 1977, she was one of the throng that surprised the Chicago Architecture Foundation one weekend afternoon when two docents waited at the corner of Clark Street and Irving Park Road to give the first tour of Graceland Cemetery on the northern hem of Wrigleyville. They expected a group of no more than 80; no fewer than 1,200 showed up.
Other than that, Pomaranc knew no more about headstones and what lay below than your average 20th Century American, who prefers not to think about death and its rituals.
But no one else on the guidebook committee volunteered to take the three private, non-sectarian cemeteries (chosen because of their age and
architectural value): Graceland, Rosehill and Oak Woods, at 67th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in the South Side`s Woodlawn neighborhood. So Pomaranc, bless her soul, signed up.
Now, after a summer`s research that once left her completely lost in the middle of Rosehill as closing time drew near, she is Trivial Pursuit-the Chicago Cemetery edition-Personified.
Slip her into walking shoes and set her loose in any of the three stomping grounds, and she`ll take you on a spin packed with more tragedy, comedy and flat-out drama than you`d ever expect from a day among the dead.
You`ll walk over, tiptoe around or trip upon the final destinations of the men and women who have given the world the McCormick reaper, the glass-box skyscraper (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), the duplicating machine (A.B. Dick), the Pullman car, ”Popular Mechanics” (Henry Windsor), the Schwinn bicycle, the Vaughan seed and Montgomery Ward catalogs, the Woman`s Christian Temperance Union (Frances E. Willard), the U.S. Railway Mail Service (George B. Armstrong), the Palmer House Hotel, Hinckley & Schmidt bottled water, the Leo Burnett advertising agency, the Shedd Aquarium, countless Rubloff shopping malls, and the Oscar Mayer weiner.
Voyage in a pickle barrel
You depart Graceland with the knowledge that the man who gave Chicago the Newberry Library didn`t particularly care for books and, millionaire though he was, made his final voyage home from Europe packed inside a pickle barrel.
You hang your head for poor Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who died near-penniless and couldn`t even find peace in death. When her ex-husband, Harold, died, their son, Fowler, had her dug up from the McCormick family plot, where she had been lined up for some time with patriarch and reapermaker Cyrus, and shipped her to the far side of the pond in Graceland Cemetery.
You chuckle at the superegos of guys like ”Long John” Wentworth, the 6- foot-6, 21st mayor of Chicago, who built himself a 72-foot granite obelisk in Rosehill Cemetery, but didn`t want his name engraved anywhere on it. Modesty was not his motive.
He reputedly explained: ”If there is no inscription on my monument, people will ask whose monument it is. Being informed it is John Wentworth`s monument, they will ransack old records and visit libraries to find out who John Wentworth was. When they find out, they will remember.” Wentworth`s family scrubbed his plans. They had his name etched in letters almost a foot high.
”It`s like you`re out visiting friends,” says Pomaranc, whose list of favorites includes the understated Mr. Rosenwald, who chose an unadorned slab barely visible behind low bushes, and the inspiring John Peter Altgeld, the late Illinois governor buried in Graceland, who chose two stirring but controversial quotes for his towering limestone marker, about his pardoning of the Haymarket anarchists and his opposition to using federal troops in the Pullman Strike of 1894.
”I wouldn`t have known Marshall Field in life,” says Pomaranc, ambling toward the Field family plot in Graceland where a pensive bronze lady watches over a reflecting pool that more often than not is drained because drowned critters routinely clog the plumbing.
”But it`s some kind of connection. Some kind of ancestor worship. It`s celebrity.
”Why do people want to stand out in a back alley to see a star exiting the theater? What`s the impulse? It`s a little bit of the same thing here.
”And it`s like walking through a history book.”
Egyptian motifs
You see who saw fit to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a majestic, open-air temple of Doric columns, and then planted it high on the banks of Graceland`s Willowmere pond (Potter and Bertha Palmer, the hotelier and his wife, who at the turn of the century was queen of city society).
You see who favored the so fashionable at the close of the 19th Century, but then considered the pagan origins of the pyramid and decided to hedge his eternal bets by standing a Victorian angel by the side of the crypt door
(Peter Schoenhofen of Schoenhofen Brewing Co., whose steep-sided pyramid can`t be missed in the Palmers` high-rent neighborhood in Graceland).
Sociologist and historian Kenneth T. Jackson, Columbia University professor and author of the recently published ”Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery,” says plenty of knowledge can be unearthed studying your city`s cemeteries.
”If tomorrow we were all killed by nerve gas, and the Man in the Moon came back in a century, he could almost reconstruct exactly this society by studying the cemeteries. Therein you`ll find class structure; the change in the family, where a century ago it was common to find a dozen members in a family plot, now to even find a man and wife is less common; racism; and a change in attitude toward religion.
”In a way,” said Jackson, during a recent telephone interview, ”you can almost reconstruct the whole city. Who lives on the fancy streets, who`s on the outskirts. Who resides in fancy mansions, who lives anonymously in the ghettos.”
The superintendents of Graceland, Rosehill and Oak Woods made no bones about laying out the class structure of the metropolis in progress.
All three were chartered between 1853 and 1861, at the height of America`s rural cemetery movement, when for the first time burial grounds moved away from the somber, straight lines of the church graveyard and into the parklike settings on the bucolic fringes of the city.
The Victorian preoccupation with death and Thorstein Veblen`s
”conspicuous consumption”-conspicuous in death as in life-are obvious in the cemeteries` elaborate monuments, built by the great architects of the time for the commercial, industrial and political giants of the time.
From the turn of the century till about 40 years ago, Jackson says, ”you practically had to have a policeman directing traffic in the cemeteries,”
what with all the Sunday motorists out for a ride and a family picnic on the sprawling green lawns. It made perfect sense, then, he says, to throw up a half-million dollar marble monument to boast to passersby in perpetuity: ”I was big in this town. I was rich. And don`t you forget it.”
The whole notion of piling stone on tombs ”actually dates back to prehistoric times, when people threw rocks on a grave to keep the wolves from digging up the body,” says Pomaranc, knocking some of the romance out of what became a monumental urge.
Among the loftiest of Chicago`s grave rocks are Louis Sullivan`s landmark Getty Tomb (Graceland), Lorado Taft`s eerie bronze figure ”Eternal Silence” (Graceland), and the McKim, Mead & White firm`s kneeling angel and six Corinthian columns erected for piano-maker William Kimball (Graceland).
In Mausoleum Row at Rosehill, or around the pond at Graceland, marble slab after marble slab, the names read like the table of contents of Great Souls Who Built Chicago.
At Graceland, starting on the south edge of the pond, the ring goes like this: Insull (as in Samuel, president of Commonwealth Edison), Goodman (as in Lumber Co. and later Theatre, built in honor of the playwright son who died at 35, having succumbed to the great influenza epidemic of 1918), Palmer (Hotel), McCormick (first the reaper, then International Harvester), Burnham (the architect who made no small plans, laying out Paris on the Prairie with the Chicago Plan of 1909), Mies van der Rohe (architect, the International Style). At Rosehill, it reads: Dawes (Charles Gates Dawes, Nobel laureate, U.S. vice president under Calvin Coolidge), Harris (Bank), Scott (Carson, Pirie . . . & Co.).
It`s on the far outer fringes of Graceland that one stumbles upon a sad page from the history of an American motorcycle gang. There, under a pink granite slab marked with the Outlaws` signature skull and crossbones, lies Henry R. Schefe, 1939-Papa Snake-1979. He waits, apparently, for Carol L., 1939-Mama Snake-.
