The After Party

Laurel Hill Cemetery's got big plans for the dearly departed.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Aug 18, 2009

Having just lost my mother, I know about searching for just the right grave site. I have a feeling she'd have liked Laurel Hill, the 173-year-old cemetery on Ridge Avenue where the dead speak, opulent balls are thrown and theater troupes are given free rein.

Sure, you can take tours of the cemetery's bucolic landscape and epic stones — the "Mother and Twins" marble giant, Millionaire Row's mausoleums, monuments carved by Alexander Calder. But there's more to these 78 tranquil acres when it comes to praising — and raising — the dead.

Tonight, for example, local theater company Brat Productions will host a preview reading of their upcoming "Haunted Poe" project, in which the long-gone writer returns from the grave to spook us, literarily. (See our Q&A with Brat director Michael Alltop.) Then there's the annual Gravediggers' Ball fundraiser in October, this year in honor of lauded Phillies announcer Harry Kalas — who happens to be one of the voices heard throughout Laurel Hill's just-initiated cell-phone tours. Visitors can listen to Harry the K (courtesy his family, the Phillies, NFL Films, etc.) along with acted—out letters from other well-known Laurel Hill inhabitants.

"We were wrapping up the final phase of this tour when Harry Kalas died," says Gwen Kaminski, Laurel Hill's development/programs director. "When he was buried here, we knew his voice had to be a part of our program." The other voices on the tour are culled from materials within Laurel Hill's archives — letters, diaries, newspaper clippings — and the dead are brought to life via staged readings. Since July 31, any visitor to the cemetery's "RIP VIP" self-guided audio tour can dial a local number and contact the likes of Gen. George Gordon Meade and poet Sarah Josepha Hale for the price of your usual minutes.

But Laurel Hill hasn't always been such a vibrant destination.

Kaminski says the cemetery's current boom can be traced to a problem: By the mid-19th century, it was so popular as a final resting place, no one could get in. Laurel Hill's land filled and — hemmed in by the Schuylkill River, the city and Fairmount Park — it had no room to expand.

"The site entered a period of decline that lasted until the cultural revolution of the '70s when people began to take interest in the past," says Kaminski. "Laws were passed protecting and sanctifying crumbling historic sites that would've been subject to the wrecking ball."

Around the same time, scholar John Francis Marion began offering free tours when Laurel Hill's weeds were 6 feet high and wild dogs roamed its grounds. (Back then, romping through an old boneyard was cool in its creepiness.) In 1978, a descendant of the cemetery's founder started Friends of Laurel Hill Cemetery, a nonprofit whose mission was to continue the tours as well as preserve and promote Laurel Hill as a National Historic Landmark via the development of unique public events.

"Those rogue tours evolved," says Kaminski, who says that in the cemetery's current incarnation, dark realities are turned into dark humor, enabling us to enjoy life before time's up. This way, the dead get in a last laugh. "I think they'd thank us for putting the 'rave' back into graveyard."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Laurel Hill Cemetery is open Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and Sat.-Sun., 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m., free, 3822 Ridge Ave., 215-228-8200 thelaurelhillcemetery.org.

Read up on Brat'S "Haunted Poe" preview at citypaper.net/arts.

Spooky, Scary: View more Laurel Hill images at citypaper.net/arts.

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