Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Author: Father Pitt

  • Theodore F. Straub Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    One wonders whether the neighbors think of the Straub mausoleum as bringing down the tone of the neighborhood. Among the architect-designed classical temples of the Pitcairns and Clemsons and so forth, here is a little Romanesque mausoleum that seems to be a dealer’s stock model; the William H. McCarthy mausoleum in Calvary Cemetery is identical, with the addition of a cross to suit Catholic taste. One likes to imagine the spirits of the very rich reacting the way they would react if they were still alive and their new neighbor announced that he was going to put up a very tasteful manufactured home on his lot.

    The statue on top seems to be a version of that very popular flower-strewing mourner who appears in many of our cemeteries, usually handless if she is at ground level; compare the Aul, Potts, Alexander H. King, Baxmyer, and Nickel monuments.

  • Hipple Angel, Homewood Cemetery

    An angel in high relief stands before a rustic boulder and drops lily flowers on the Hipples’ graves. The earliest burial in this plot seems to be Marion F. Hipple, who died in 1899, and that is a good guess at the date of this angel.

  • Peacock Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    Alexander Rowland (or Rolland) Peacock was a business partner of Andrew Carnegie; he built this tasteful Doric mausoleum for himself years before he died in 1928.

  • Civil War Monument, Chartiers Cemetery

    The statue of a soldier looks very determined in a chunky 1880s way. When granite replaced marble as the material of choice for monument sculptors, it seems as though it took them a while to learn how to convey any subtlety in the harder stone.

  • Ahlers Obelisk, St. John’s Lutheran Cemetery (Spring Hill)

    Obelisks in their simple form are timeless. The base may give a clue to the date, but this is a particularly simple and timeless design for a base. The obelisk stands in a plot of matched graves, of which the earliest dates from 1879; so we may take that as a rough date for the monument