Alvarez Stained Glass
This crap picture from an old Treo cameraphone does no justice to this stained glass, which I think is among the most beautiful at Old Calvary. It is in the Alvarez mausoleum, which has a connection to my hometown of Tampa. Tampa was and still is an epicenter of cigar manufacturing in the U.S., and Miguel Alvarez was a cigar magnate whose peers in the business had factories down there. It doesn’t look like Alvarez’s company ever had a plant in Tampa but his mausoleum is next door to those of other individuals from the business who did. Here is an outtake from a lengthier obituary in the trade journal Tobacco, December 19, 1918.
Miguel Alvarez
The unfortunate thing about the stained glass is that it is no longer visible to the public. The mausoleum door was busted open, so to prevent the inevitable vandalism the cemetery just boarded the whole thing over. That’s too bad because this glass is unusual enough that I have to ask if it had any special meaning to Alvarez or anybody else.
Here is a better shot, taken in August, 2008, with a Canon G9 point and shoot that I borrowed from a former friend.
Stained Glass at Calvary
It seems like security patrol or people in charge at some cemeteries don’t want anybody looking at the stained glass contained in their mausoleums. The closest I came to getting kicked out was at St. Michael’s, when I turned around from looking at stained glass through a mausoleum window to find an angry looking security guard looking at me like I was a shoplifter. The altercation that seemed inevitable was intercepted by the appearance of some people attending a funeral service asking this security person some questions. Had they not appeared I might have had a conversation with this person, whose demeanor abruptly switched from suspicious and confrontational toward me to smiling and sympathetic toward the funeral goers.
Calvary security has never given me the evil eye for looking at the stained glass, though I did once get a long stare from someone who seemed to think my sepulchral portrait photo run was suspicious in some way. From a distance he would not have known exactly what I was doing out there in collecting as many pictures as I could of those type of portraits. He saw my systematic marching up every aisle and interpreted the behavior to mean that I was not there to visit a specific gravesite, which seems to be what they expect. That was at New Calvary. Nobody who works there has ever bothered me at Old Calvary.
I was thinking about those portraits again after finding some audio I made at New Calvary, possibly the same day I got the evil eye from the groundskeeper/security guard. I was under the BQE engaging in some self-indulgent analysis of the possible ethical questions raised by capturing those images in the way I did. But a preemptive question addresses the fact that the portraits exist in the first place. Who’s to say that the dead necessarily wanted their likeness put out for future generations of strangers to contemplate? Certainly in the case of infants and young children there could have been no discussion.
Most people who died 90+ years ago don’t have a lot of information about them floating around on the global computer network. If it were possible I would organize a meeting of all the people who ever lived so I could ask them if they would be horrified or glorified to know that their names and faces are circulating in ways unimaginable to them when they were alive. Their memory is plucked from the relative obscurity of a single tombstone in a giant New York City cemetery, a place you could think of as one’s most humble and humbled place, and blasted off onto a global computer network like nothing they could have dreamed of.
It’s too far gone a process to turn it back or suggest it be stopped. Millions upon millions of burial records are up for grabs now. What use it is put to is, possibly, another ethical dilemma. Is it decent or moral to slap advertisements for funeral homes and florists on that content? Is it not crass to surround the burial records of an Italian family with links to cruise ships bound for Italy? For whatever genuine value these records might bring to legitimate genealogists and tree tracers I think the matter of compensating yourself for the time and energy put into making such stuff available creates a lot of questions.
But then this is the public century. Everyone that ever lived is in the public domain. Exploitative? Maybe. I mean the criteria for selection is elitist, focusing only on those gravestones with portraits on them. Those portraits being present seem to imply financial wealth of the families that owned them. You could even say that tombstones themselves are a statement of the dead’s financial ability and wherewithal. By these measures the standard of memory is based on something other than the value of lives that were lived.
