成员。其实这次参加儿子毕业典礼时我还真通过写着“
死人要复活'
的大门，走进墓地去散步。在这外面喧闹的五月底举行毕业典礼的日子，墓地里面则是格外宁静。空气十分清新，只有极少数几个人在偌大的墓碑间的草地上驻足，一小群的鸽子也在此寻食。我们不知道这块墓地是否与林璎成功设计华盛顿越战纪念碑有关，因为她曾经清楚表明她受到耶鲁的Whitney
建筑内的美国独立和内战纪念墙的影响，该纪念墙列出了死于这两场战争的耶鲁毕业生的名单。另外她在丹麦实习时也受到了欧洲墓园文化的影响。在这个万圣节周末，耶鲁每日新闻推出了一期特殊的关于格罗夫墓地的报告。它。闻响。在这个该纪念墙上给了我们一个好的机会来了解一些不同的文化，格罗夫墓地使死者和充满活力的年轻人相距得如此之近。（夏尔摩思译）
Our first Yale campus visit was very brief which left probably an
hour including typical photo taking on campus and rest in New Haven
green, it happened on the way of our drive from New York to Boston
almost twenty years ago. Once we had a chance to have a relative
thorough visit on Yale campus, the most surprising thing we
realized was that a huge cemetery graveyard was associated with
Yale. It located so closely to Yale core campus that we could
simply say that The Grove Street Cemetery is actually inside the
campus. Locating in between Yale science hill and the old campus,
science students have to walk on the streets around The Cemetery to
take classes in a daily basis. This is a distinctive culture
difference, even we had been living in the United States more than
fifteen years at a time of the visit but you were still not
comfortable that you would be always with so many dead people all
the time. The Grove Street Cemetery was surrounded by tall and
fortress-like walls so you could simply ignore its existence if you
walk outside. However, for those students who were living or taking
classes in the neighboring buildings, your window views would be a
full of Tombstones and the green lands inside the cemetery. The
Grove Cemetery is basically a backyard of the famous Yale Law
School.
Thinking about the land value for Yale for this 18-acre cemetery.
However, it would be impossible to move it to anywhere, simply
because it had too much to do with Yale's early historical years
when Yale produced numerous national figures who ended up of being
buried in the cemetery. Those names include Yale alumnus Noah
Webster and 16 of 22 former Yale Presidents. The Grove Street
Cemetery is now a National Historic landmark. There was an
independent board running the cemetery and many of board members
are Yale professors. Actually I went inside the cemetery to take a
walk after passing through its main gate labeled 'The Dead Shall be
Raised', the feeling was surprisingly peaceful in the late May of
the relative noisy graduation week. The space was widely open with
very few individuals inside but with a massive of green lawns where
pigeons playing. We don't know if this cemetery had anything to do
with Maya Lin's successful bit for Vietnam Memorial as she clearly
stated that she has been influenced by the memorial wall inside
Yale's Whitney building with lists of names of Yale alumni who died
in the civil war and her experience of studying cemetery parks when
she was in Denmark. In this Halloween weekend, Yale Daily News runs
a special report on the cemetery and provides a good opportunity
for us to taste a different culture where dead and restless youths
were living so closely.
What lies beneath
By
Sophie Grais
Friday, October 28, 2011, Yale Daily News.
The Grove Street Cemetery has plots for sale.
Interested?
We are.
As Halloween approaches, the haunted and creepy take over. Fake
cobwebs hide houses, inflatable witches cackle from windows and the
shelves at Walgreens bleed candy corn and Reese’s pieces. We stock
up on sugar, compare costumes and grow graveyards on our
lawns.
And in the midst of all these preparations, we forget about the
tombstones that lie in Yale’s own backyard: the Grove Street
Cemetery.
Many students will spend four years at Yale without ever walking
through the Grove Street graves. The cemetery is sketchy. It is far
away. It is merely a landmark in emails from Ronnell.
This is where we’re wrong.
Yale and the Grove Street Cemetery are very much intertwined: 16 of
Yale’s 22 presidents are buried within the cemetery’s fortress-like
walls, along with countless other professors and notable University
figures. Many of the cemetery’s board and standing committee
members are Yale professors, administrators or others affiliated
with the University. Professors make use of the cemetery in their
classes, and some students consider it a place of peace and refuge
within their daily lives.
IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME
The Grove Street Cemetery has celebrity status. In addition to
being a National Historic Landmark, it is sometimes called “the
Westminster Abbey of Connecticut” because it houses so many big
names: dictionary designer Noah Webster 1778, founding father Roger
Sherman and abolitionist Lyman Beecher 1797, to list a few.
Nestled between Yale Health, Commons and the Central Power Plant,
the Grove Street Cemetery deserves more than a glance on a Parents’
Weekend tour. A brownstone gate guards its entrance on Grove
Street, and the words “And the Dead Shall be Raised” keep watch
from above. Walk through the gate, and a small building awaits you.
Here you can pick up a map, detailing the history and layout of the
cemetery. As you wander through its expansive avenues and
well-maintained greenery, you might be struck by the incredible
diversity of the monuments. They come in all different shapes and
sizes, from obelisks to lions, with some more traditional tombs in
between.
Though often overlooked by students, the cemetery grounds the
University in its history and narrative. Consider the names we hear
every day: Silliman, Stiles, Whitney and Farnam. To us, these words
signify streets, dormitories, dining halls. But they’re all in the
cemetery, along with their stories and their first names too.
The Grove Street Cemetery fades into the background of our everyday
lives; we pass it on the way to Payne Whitney or spot it from afar
on Wall Street. It’s become part of the landscape of our college
experiences.
But, this holds true for some more than others. Many bedrooms in
Swing Space overlook the cemetery directly. For Kate Liebman ’13,
it has become little more than an element of the surrounding
scenery, and its well-kept horticulture provides a nice view from
her room.
“I have no feelings about it one way or the other. It’s nice in the
summer because it’s really green,” Liebman said. “Now the leaves
are changing, and it’s still beautiful.”
But Adam Demetriou ’13, also a Swing Space resident, has had an odd
experience. One morning, Demetriou woke up around 7 a.m. and saw “a
guy just standing there.
“I’m not used to seeing people out there,” Demetriou said. “There’s
never anyone else there.”
By the time Demetriou had gotten out of the shower, the mysterious
man had vanished. Like Liebman, Demetriou has never been inside the
cemetery, but does not have a desire to go.
When darkness falls, the cemetery’s appearance can change
completely. “It’s kind of creepy at night when you look out the
window and all you see is the cemetery,” said Sarah Kelley ’13.
“I’ve walked around it once, and it was kind of creepy, but nothing
really weird.”
Unsightly or not, the cemetery hasn’t always been there.
In 18th-century New Haven, most burials took place on the Green,
the center of town at the time. Many of those remains still lie
beneath the newly paved and sodded square we know today, or below
what is now Center Church on the Green. With the outbreak of yellow
fever epidemics in New Haven in 1794 and 1795, though, the Green
just couldn’t take it anymore. Mass burials of fever victims became
an unbearably pungent public health hazard, and something had to
give.
City planner John Hillhouse developed the plans for the Grove
Street Cemetery, originally named the “New Haven City Burial
Ground,” to resolve this dilemma. He proposed the construction of a
park-like cemetery far away from the stenches of the Green, in what
was then considered the New Haven suburbs. At the time, Hillhouse’s
innovation was unparalleled.
“Grove Street Cemetery is the first landscaped and beautified
cemetery in the world,” said Judith Schiff, chief research
archivist at Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives Library, also a member
of the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery and the Grove Street
Cemetery Standing Committee. Established in 1797, this National
Historic Landmark predates Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery – often
thought to be older than Grove Street – by seven years. Schiff
explained the uncertainty that surrounds Hillhouse’s creative
process and “how he came up with this idea of perpetual care and
beautification.” For the first time, a cemetery became a pleasant
place to visit, somewhere “where people could revere the dead”
rather than navigate unorganized, unpleasant graveyards, Schiff
added.
Today, students and community members alike still benefit from
Hillhouse’s devotion to beautification. The cemetery can provide a
way to relax and to escape the stresses of Yale. Isabel Ortiz ’14
began to take walks in the cemetery her freshman year for exactly
this reason. “It was really nice to have a place off campus but
still nearby, where I could leave the bubble a little bit,” said
Ortiz, who is originally from Argentina. “I just really love
cemeteries. There’s a cemetery I love [in Argentina], so it kind of
reminds me of that one. It reminds me of home and of my family, in
a weird way.”
Grier Barnes ’14 visited the cemetery for the first time during
finals last spring. Barnes was on her way to the library to do
research when her mom called to tell her that her aunt had been
diagnosed with breast cancer. “I had been so stressed, and that was
the final straw,” Barnes said. “I started bawling on the way to the
Law School library. My mom asked if there was anywhere else I could
go, and I said I could try the cemetery because it was right
there.”
Once she arrived at the cemetery, Barnes was struck by its sense of
openness. “It’s not like you’re locked up in your room crying in
your bed. You have the sense of being in an open place. It’s a very
intimate but shared space,” she said. “Now, if I’m upset, I’m
definitely going to go there. It’s a nice spot to get away from
your room and not be the crying girl in front of the dining hall. I
hate crying in public. It was really nice to be able to cry in a
public spot but to be very alone at the same time,” she
added.
FROM THEN TO NOW
Tombstones line the outer walls of the cemetery, and closer
examination reveals them to be in alphabetical order. In the 20
years following the establishment of the cemetery, families were
invited to retrieve their loved ones’ tombstones from the Green and
transport them to the cemetery. At the end of this grace period,
the 2,000 remaining tombstones were brought from the Green to the
Grove Street Cemetery and ordered along the wall. Consequently,
“for the first time, you had clusters of families who had been
scattered along the Green,” Schiff said. Their remains, however,
were left buried in their original locations.
For Raisa Bruner ’13, these tombstones have great personal
significance. (Bruner is a former production and design editor for
the News). Among them is her ninth-great-grandmother’s headstone,
which was moved from the Green to the Grove Street Cemetery when it
opened. Though her ninth-great-grandfather’s tombstone could not be
found, he was one of the original founders of the New Haven colony
in 1639. More than 50 of Bruner’s ancestors are buried in the
cemetery, for the Tuttle family “was one of the more prolific
families in New Haven,” she said.
Bruner only found out about her relation to the Tuttles when her
great-aunt, an amateur genealogist, passed away during her freshman
year. Her father happened upon documents that mentioned New Haven
while managing her estate, and the rest was history. Bruner has
visited the cemetery three times since then. “Personally, knowing
that I have family there makes it feel like I’m connected to it.
When I’m there, I’m in a place of reflection about my past, what I
belong to, and where I belong,” she said.
This new discovery did not change Bruner’s Yale experience
drastically, but rather broadened it. “I’d already felt like this
was my place, but it gave me a better sense of the history.
Especially after researching it, I’ve discovered that I am deeply
connected to New Haven and Yale College. Whether or not that
changes my experience here, it changes my perspective on my
experience here,” she added.
The alphabetical order of tombstones such as the Tuttles’ testifies
to the incredible organization of the cemetery. In addition, this
well-populated “City of the Dead” had a surprisingly democratic
structure. The Grove Street Cemetery has been nonsectarian from its
opening. Until the 1840s, it was really “the only place for
burials,” Schiff said. As churches began to build their own
cemeteries, fewer people were buried in Grove Street, and it became
more selective. The original map of the cemetery indicates specific
allocations of spaces for different social groups, such as “one for
people associated with Yale, one for persons of color, and one for
persons who died in New Haven,” G. Harold Welch Jr. ’50, former
president of the Grove Street Cemetery, said while explaining an
original map of the cemetery. “It’s very interesting that over 200
years ago, it was a very, very democratic place,” he added.
Even if they’ve never stepped inside, most students know the
quotation above the gate: “And the Dead Shall be Raised.” The
reasoning behind the choice of this unsettling phrase, though,
remains unclear. It is a quote from the Bible, an excerpt from
Corinthians 15:52: “In the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the
last trump, the dead shall be raised.” The quotation in its
entirety is inscribed on the tomb of Theophilius Eaton, one of the
founders of the New Haven colony, behind the Center Church on the
Green. Schiff remarked that early watercolor depictions of
architect Henry Austin’s gate do not include the quote, suggesting
that it was perhaps a later addition.
And if the dead are indeed raised, many ghosts of Yalies past will
roam New Haven. For in addition to the many Yale affiliates who are
buried there independently, Yale owns two lots — groups of plots —
in the Grove Street Cemetery. The first, Schiff explained, is
mostly filled with students who died while at Yale and lived far
away, could not be retrieved by their families or suffered from
extremely contagious diseases that mandated immediate burial. The
second lot, which still has space open, was intended for other
people affiliated with Yale, like professors or administrators. One
such example is paleontologist O.C. Marsh, who discovered several
species of dinosaurs and founded the Peabody Museum, and whose body
is now buried in the Yale lot.
The inspiration of notables like Marsh lives on in the classroom.
Some professors structure class activities around the cemetery
because of its historical and scientific value.
Tessa Williams ’10 took a playwriting class, “Microdramas” with
Paula Vogel, in which students had to spend half of one class
walking around the cemetery individually. “We had to pick a grave,
spend some time around it, and write a microdrama about the person
buried there,” Williams said.
Scarlett Lee ’12 also used the cemetery for research in her
“General Ecology” class. Lee recently had to go there to record
dates of death of various tombstones “to study the death rates and
model the population of New Haven,” she said.
The legacies of the cemetery live on not only in students’
coursework, but also in university programs and scholarships.
Schiff, who has worked to emphasize notable women buried in the
Grove Street Cemetery, also recounted the story of Mary Goodman.
Goodman, a New Haven resident, was an African-American woman with
no family of her own. She inherited property through marriage and
ran a relatively prosperous laundry business. She decided to offer
her estate to Yale because “after the Civil War, she didn’t feel
like things were progressing fast enough, and she thought that if
black ministers were educated at the Yale Divinity School, then
they could inspire young boys to go to college,” said Schiff. When
she died in 1872, the University offered to bury Goodman in the
second Yale lot as a display of gratitude. Goodman’s scholarship is
still in use at the Divinity School.
GROUND AND GOWN
The Goodman scholarship is but one example of close relations
between Yale and the Grove Street Cemetery.
Schiff attributed much of this overlap to the interest that members
of the Yale community take in the cemetery. People who make their
careers at Yale “want a place to be buried,” she said. “They like
the idea that many presidents and professors have been buried
there, and they like the nonsectarian aspect. Every religion is
represented there.”
Additionally, all board members must own a lot in the cemetery in
order to have a place on the board. As a result, members of the
board and of the standing committee have parents, grandparents or
children buried in the cemetery.
Yale and the Grove Street Cemetery have grown up together over the
past 200 years, and, like siblings, have learned to share and
collaborate, to discuss and to compromise. In fact, about 95
percent of the cemetery’s endowment is invested with the Yale
endowment, according to John Simon LAW ’53, a professor at the Yale
Law School and longtime member of the Grove Street Cemetery
Standing Committee. The cemetery recently decided to place its
funds with the Yale endowment “so we can get the benefit of David
Swensen,” said Simon, who described Swensen as “the best investor
in the country.” The cemetery retains a small portion of its
endowment — around 5 percent — for use on current or ongoing
projects.
Like brother and sister, the Grove Street Cemetery and Yale have
also seen moments of tension or disagreement, albeit few and far
between. Schiff told a “now rather hackneyed, but still kind of
funny” joke about the dynamics between Yale and the cemetery. “The
joke is, ‘Yes, the dead shall be raised, but not until Yale needs
the land,’” said Schiff. “It’s a fabrication because Yale doesn’t
even own the land. I don’t think people ever realized how Yale
would eventually surround the cemetery because when the cemetery
was built, it was in the suburbs,” she continued.
Yale hasn’t tried to take the land, but proposed modifications to
the cemetery have provoked interesting discussions. A relatively
recent disagreement between Yale and the cemetery concerned a
proposition to create a gate on the Prospect Street side of the
cemetery. With the plans to build two new colleges, the gate would
enable easier access from those buildings to the center of campus.
Students would be able to walk through the cemetery instead of
around it.
“Some thought it would open the cemetery up. It’s a walled fortress
on some sides and has grating on others,” said Welch. “They thought
this would be more inviting.”
Simon explained the opposition to this idea. It would have involved
cutting a hole in the fence surrounding the cemetery, which is part
of its historic preservation. Students’ behavior and respect for
the cemetery could also not be guaranteed. “With people walking
through all the time, some might stop to have drinks or picnics or
things like that, and it would be very hard to police. We also
don’t want stragglers left behind when the gates close at four.
It’s happened before and we have to get the cops to come in and let
them out,” said Simon.
Ultimately, the controversy was resolved and the board decided
against the addition of a new gate. “They thought it might be nice,
we talked about it and then decided it was not a good thing for us
to agree to,” said Simon. “That was a difference of views that was
really settled very amicably.”
Welch, however, raises an important question: how can the Grove
Street Cemetery be more inviting to students? Its looming presence
and the quote alone can be enough to scare away visitors. Welch
believes strongly that the renovation of the meeting house would
encourage more people to explore the cemetery. Currently, the
meeting house lies directly behind the cemetery gate, and it is
little more than a place to pick up a map and perhaps ask for
directions. Turning this building into more of a visitors’ welcome
center would make it a “much more receptive place,” said Welch.
“It’s a peaceful place, and it’s open to all, all days of the year.
People can come for reflection, for solace, for thought of any kind
… It’s too bad that we haven’t done more to advertise that
fact.”
Welch, who was in Davenport, doesn’t think he “ever set foot in the
cemetery” in his four years as an undergraduate because he was “so
preoccupied” with his studies. The cemetery later became the site
of both his parents’ and grandparents’ burials. Welch also
mentioned a place in the cemetery where “two chemistry professors
of considerable note,” John Kirkwood and Lars Onsager, are buried
next to one another. “[John Kirkwood] died first, and there’s long
list of all his accomplishments,” said Welch. “His rival, Lars
Onsager, is buried next to him, and it all it says is ‘Lars
Onsager,’ with dates. Then ‘Nobel Laureate.’ Period. That’s one of
my favorite places. It’s the ultimate putdown.”
ALL ROADS LEAD TO GROVE
Stories like that of Kirkwood and Onsager, despite proving Death’s
power as the great equalizer, demonstrate the greatest beauty of
the Grove Street Cemetery: its ability to immortalize personalities
and narratives. It preserves the fiery rivalry between these two
chemists just as it maintains the legacies of O.C. Marsh and Mary
Goodman and provides current drama students with food for
thought.
Though not officially affiliated with Yale, the cemetery stands as
a crucial location within the university. Surrounded by Yale on all
sides, it provides a safe spot for students looking for for
contemplation or solitude. It brings together members of the Yale
and New Haven communities, both past and present. And the
occasional disagreement, such as with the Prospect Street gate,
forces a reevaluation of the cemetery’s relationship to Yale and
its role in the city. As the first landscaped cemetery, Grove
Street’s carefully crafted plots defied traditional perceptions of
burial grounds as a “source for pestilence” and “scary places,”
said Schiff.
But maybe not on Halloween night.
