Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Mausoleums

  • Steen Mausoleum, Chartiers Cemetery

    The best way to describe this style is probably “Baroque”: it’s a splendid half-underground mausoleum, of the type usually called a “burial vault” in the days when such things were built. It’s the only one in the Chartiers Cemetery, which was founded in 1861.

    The front bears the date 1874, which suggests that the vault was built originally for David C. Steen, who died at the age of 20 or 21 in that year. An Emma M. Lappe Steen died the next year, also at the age of 20 or 21; did a young widow never recover from her loss? In fact, the mere dates tell us a good deal about the appalling mortality even among the well-to-do in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a list of eleven names, four lived past the age of thirty.

    In a later article we have more pictures of the Steen mausoleum.

  • McAlister Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

    A particularly splendid Egyptian temple; it would be rather ordinary but for the broad porch that wraps around three sides, making it magnificent.

  • Martin Lappe Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery

    A small rustic Romanesque mausoleum made almost top-heavy by the large statue of Hope holding her anchor. Father Pitt knows nothing about Martin Lappe except that he died in 1896 and his name is on this mausoleum.

  • Lillian Russell Moore Mausoleum, Allegheny Cemetery

    Probably the most famous beauty in American history, Lillian Russell married four times. Her fourth marriage was to Alexander Pollock Moore, publisher of the Leader in Pittsburgh, and it seems to have been a happy union. When Lillian died in 1922, her mourning husband put up this mausoleum, with the simple epitaph “The world is better for her having lived.” Mr. Moore later went on to be ambassador to Spain and then to Peru, but when he finally joined his wife, she still got top billing. His initials on the door are the only external indication that Mr. Moore is buried here, too.

  • Clark Mausoleum, Homewood Cemetery

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    A standard Ionic temple, though the inset porch is a somewhat unusual touch.