Lake View Cemetery is a garden style cemetery locaed in 1869 on 211 acres on Cleveland’s east side. It is modeled after other gaden style cemeteries including Mount Auburn in Cambridge, MA and Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadephia. Garden style, or rural cemeteries, were designed to move burial places out of crowded urban areas and into more rural areas. They were also designed to provide a place of beauty for city dwellers to escape to and in the early days of Lake View people came to the cemetery to walk and picnic. The most famous maseleum in Lake View is the Garfield Memorial.
I live three miles from Lake View and it is still a place where people go to walk and relax. The cemetery hosts events, tours of famous graves, and even concerts. Through their website, the cemetery also offers mobile tours on varous themes that provide audio and a map to guide you to certain memorials. In other posts, I’ll share my experiences taking some of these tours.
I always love visiting Lake View as driving through the elegant gates feels as if I’m transported to a place outside of time. The cemetery is beautiful and full of hills, plants, winding roads, and different types of graves. One of the things that always impresses me about Lake View is that it very much feels like a place for the living and not just the dead. It is well kept and feels like visiting a landscaped garden and not a cemetery per se. It feels much more welcoming than smaller cemeteries that sometimes have a keep out vibe.
During a visit last summer, my daughter and I drove by one of the ponds in the cemetery and saw a heron. We stopped to get a closer look and realized we had parked right by Elliott Ness’ tombstone. Close to Ness’ tombstone was a grave that had pens stuck in it and I realizzed it was the gravestone of Harvey Parker, a Cleveland cartoonist who had appeared on an episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows.
Lakeview is a mecca for wildlife and on the day that we visited, we saw what we thought was an unleashed dog and imediately got judgey about who would have an unleashed dog in the cemetery. However, when we saw it again, we realized that it was a coyote who was standing right in the area that we had intended to visit that day: Section 50.
Section 50 is primarily African American graves and most of them in this section are flat tombstones inscribed with names and dates. However, there were some that gave an indication of who the people were in life. These included gravestones with musical notes on them and one with a chef’s hat. Perhaps my favorite was of a well dressed angel and the inscription that “This Lady had Style.”
Although there are much larger memorials in the cemetery, there was something about this small angel that struck me as a beautiful memorial to a woman who was obvously loved. Garfield’s grand memorial towers over the cemetery and from its heights you can see Lake Erie, but this small angel is a reminder that memorials do not have to be large to be grand.