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In honor of All Soul's Day -
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 It is Homewood where Pittsburgh's millionaires - the Frick family, the Heinz family, George Mesta, the Benedum family, the Mellons - chose to make their final resting place, high on a hill, one mausoleum after another looking so much like a small Greek city.
Surrounding this bastion of the elite are other enclaves - a Jewish cemetery, and Chinese, and Greek Orthodox. It is in Homewood that the cemetery section of Bloomsday is read, near the soldiers and the ladies of the Protestant Home for the Aged.
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 There are some famous people buried here. Steven Foster, whose music is known world wide, is buried under a modest headstone in Allegheny, as are General John Neville, Lillian Russell, Don Brockett, and Josh Gibson. 16 mayors of Pittsburgh now reside in Allegheny cemetery, if you wish to seek them out.
But we go to Allegheny Cemetery, not so much to pay homage at the tomb of some dead millionaire, but to stroll among the angels and spires, the wonderously shaped rock monuments of those ordinary Pittsburghers, who history may never have claimed. |
  I had been searching for this cemetery for nearly 30 years! In the early '70s, when I working at the FilmMakers, I served as an advisor for a group of teens who were setting out to film a series of Vampire films. They took me to their first location  shoot, which was in a small, old cemetery in the wilds of West Mifflin. It is in an old, uncharted section of town, where the roads twist and turn and ride the hills and deep valleys like nanny goats, and the houses are few and far between and sorely in need of handyman's attention. This is how I remembered it: It was long and narrow, sloping steeply upwards where a life-size crucifix with sculpted mourning figures crowned the top of the hill; there was a gate, with a name and date (I thought it was 1913 or 1918). And the graves were all of children - many of them adorned with lambs or angels. - and this was important to remember -- the city street cut through the cemetery, separating the children's section from a the larger, adult cemetery. 
12 years later, I was working on a video tape of a program of "Songs of Death" and needed cemetery images to lay over one of the songs. I thought of the children's cemetery. I searched for it - in vain! I drove all over West Mifflin, and never found it. I asked friends, wrote to the newspaper of my search, all in vain. And then one night - quite recently - I was looking at the Pittsburgh Street Atlas for something else, and noticed that there were two cemeteries in West Mifflin that were bisected by city streets. Perhaps one of them was my children's cemetery! The next day we set out to locate these two cemeteries. The first, off the Homestead-Duquesne Rd. was not the one I was looking for. The second was not so easily found - and was divided in a way not indicated on the map, but we followed the lay of the land, and instinct, and there it was! How can I describe the elation I felt at having found something that had been on my mind for so many years? It was not exactly as I remembered; the year on the gate was 1916 and only one section was devoted to the children's graves. And the children -- "Our Angel" Nov. 3 - Nov 8 1915; "Baby Charles" - died at 6 months; "Beloved son" - 6 years. "Elizabeth" - 10 years. One family lost 3 little ones in a single year. Most of the children's graves date from 1916 through 1920, possibly the result of an influenza epidemic.
The children's graves are high on the hill, close the the crucifix and mourners; across the path are newer graves, dating from the 1940s - 1960s. Many are graves of adults. I'd like to think these are the families of the infants, gathering near their little ones.  |
We started going to Homewood in the spring; a friend was writing a book about the Frick family and we went to look at their family plot. We went the following spring to commemorate a project completed, and the following because it had become a ritual, a habit, a thing to do when the days began to warm.