If this apparently doctored photo from Calvary Cemetery is to be believed it would seem the East River had risen up and flooded Long Island City as far east as Greenpoint Avenue. I would have to go back out to Calvary to prove this with certainty but I don’t think there is an unobstructed view to the East River from anywhere within Calvary. Then again I’ll be happy to be proven wrong about this.
Calvary Cemetery Flooded By East River?
Other janky evidence of doctoring seems to be present in the structures seen in the Manhattan skyline but I’m not ready to make a building-by-building comparison. It’s just strange that the cemetery would promote itself with imagery that misrepresents what the place really looks like. You could even go so far as to say it evokes imagery of a future where climate change and melting ice caps threaten to cause flooding which would essentially erase this cemetery. This makes it look like the rows of tombstones trail off straight into the river.
The closest photos of mine that I’m willing to dig up for purposes of comparison would be from the John Wick scene I attempted to recreate, but those photos don’t illustrate the view toward the East River to show how fake the Calvary image is. I poked around the Internet for pictures of the Empire State Building as seen from Calvary, and was amused to find a photo of mine at pixels.com came up number one in an image search for that phrase. But a closer replica of the scene shown in Calvary’s image comes from Diana G’s Flickr photostream, which I have encountered many times over the years. This shot makes it pretty clear there is no unobstructed view of the East River from Calvary, at least not from the more low-lying areas such as this, which I think is Section 48.
The doctored image is on the front side of a card with a few blurbs about the cemetery, including mention that new areas are now available and that pre-need arrangements can be made. I don’t know when this card was printed but for most of the time I’ve known Calvary they did not allow for pre-need arrangements, at least not at Old Calvary. I saw last year where they were tearing up the ground to make room for more in-ground burials, but anything I read about said they were not taking reservations. If you wanted to be buried at Old Calvary you had to die soon. That seems to have changed.
I think the last time I entered Calvary was about a year ago. My love affair with the place, and with all cemeteries, evaporated pretty abruptly. It started when I took stock of just how much garbage I produce. It’s probably no more than any other individual but it seems like my kitchen’s three garbage cans are constantly filling up with garbage and stuff for recycling. From this train of thought I started to consider the cemetery business as a means of disposal, finding them quintessentially archaic and inefficient. I recognize that the grounds can be beautiful, and the quantity of otherwise unwritten history etched into the stones serves its purpose in connecting the dots of lineages. But they consume so much resource, the services offered are expensive, and on top of all this I just came to see cemeteries as overwhelmingly depressing.
Nevertheless, as part of some web server maintenance I polished off my cemetery photography web pages, which represent only a fraction of how many pictures I took out there. Combing through them evokes no feelings of nostalgia for the epic treks I made to Calvary and other NYC burial grounds. For as much niche history as exists on the city’s countless tombstones it remains true that few of them are ever consulted, and the legacy of most individuals falls into the terrible silence of being forgotten.
I, for one, had long assumed I would end up at Calvary, but assuming it is up to me I don’t think I will. I don’t know if cremation will be my choice or if I will be liquefied and flushed down the drain, but in-ground burial is not my plan. If cremation is the path and my ashes are in an urn then I want the urn displayed in a way that makes people smile. Calvary has relatively recently gotten into the cremation thing but I don’t care for the way they do it, with uniform niches into which visitors can not see. I hate to say it but I’ll probably end up at St. Michael’s, even with my dislike of the grounds and the security staff’s overzealous questioning and surveillance of my presence there. But I like their new columbarium structures well enough, combining the morgue-like interment of full coffins with much smaller niches into which decorative urns and other items can be placed.
This subject matter makes me nauseous. It never used to. Ironically enough I found the doctored Calvary card while looking for stuff to throw away.
