Community College of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA)
In 1837 necessity drove John Jay Smith to create a new kind of cemetery in Philadelphia. Not that there weren’t already cemeteries. There were more than seventy of them in what we now call Center City. They stood in the way of progress and they were absolutely sure to prove tiny and inadequate for the city’s future population.
So Smith bought acres a few miles north of the city in an area that he expected to remain forever rural. He hired John Notman—later to be a famous architect but then just a young immigrant from Scotland—to lay out what the Victorians called a picturesque landscape. It would have gently curving paths, groves of trees, and splendid views of the Schuylkill. Later this rural cemetery would provide one of the important models for New York’s Central Park.
A Quaker, Smith may not have realized that his beloved trees would soon be supplemented by elaborate monuments of stone. And I mean elaborate: a model of the doorway to Moyamensing Prison for a prominent prison reformer, a mausoleum carved into a rocky hillside for an Arctic explorer, and a mother with children in her arms for a woman who died in childbirth.
We will see Victorian monuments and we will see such striking modern ones as a huge candle to light the darkness and a giant microphone for a beloved sportscaster. And we will stop at the grave of the Philadelphia photographer who, way back in 1839, took the first selfie.
Meeting Point: The Gatehouse at 3822 Ridge Avenue
Contribution: $15 for historic preservation of the monuments.