Leopold Vilsack is described in his obituary as a “millionaire banker, brewer, and property owner.” Certainly Pittsburgh owes a lot of its self-image to him, because the brewery he founded was incorporated as the Iron City Brewing Company. His mausoleum is certainly extraordinary, perhaps the most lavish Romanesque mausoleum in Pittsburgh. It is turreted like a castle, but it reminds us that the deceased was a good Catholic with a prominent cross and alpha-omega monogram.
A standard-issue Romanesque mausoleum, though unusually deep in proportion to its width; but irresistibly picturesque in the last golden rays of evening sun.
The Sunshine mausoleum from 1897, with its patient mourner uncomplainingly enduring a roosting bird, is almost certainly another ordered-from-a-catalogue mausoleum. But who is not delighted to see the name “Sunshine” engraved in cheerfully rustic letters over the entrance to a tomb? The style is hard to pin down: it has the heaviness of Romanesque, but the pointed arch suggests Gothic ambitions.
The very rich had their mausoleums designed for them by famous architects. The merely adequately rich ordered their mausoleums from a catalogue. We can say with some confidence that this attractive but undistinguished Romanesque mausoleum is a stock model because it is identical, including the statue, to the Braun mausoleum in the South Side Cemetery.
Another hulking black Pittsburgh Romanesque mausoleum, this one is distinguished by a very unusual apse. In many cemeteries, unfortunately, vandalism has persuaded the keepers to block the entrances to mausoleums with ugly concrete. It now becomes a task for archaeologists from future centuries to discover what is inside that apse.
