The final resting place of Pittsburgh's merchant princes, Allegheny
Cemetery is proof that you can take it with you--at least as far
as the grave.
The idyllic landscape of rolling hills with pateches of woodland
can easily make you forget you're surrounded by dense urban neighborhoods.
Neo-Egyptian style showed itself mainly in obelisks, but the Winter
family built themselves a whole Egyptian temple to perpetuate their memory.
It worked. Everyone remembers them as the people who are buried in the
Egyptian temple.
The doors to the Winter mausoleum are pretty far on the wrong side
of the boundary that separates art from kitsch.
A surprise awaits you when you step up to the doors of any mausoleum
and look through the glass. Almost every one has a stained-glass window
in the back. Many of the windows are standard-issue mass-produced models
like the one on the left, but some of them (like the one on the right)
are delicate works of art.
Even the people who had themselves stuck straight in the ground
often put elaborate tombstones over their heads. This fashionably rusticated
stone is adorned with a somewhat incongruously refined angel.
