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'Eternal Rest Grant Unto Them'

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

The grave of magician Harry Houdini at Machpelah Cemetery in Glendale. (Newsday Photo/Dick Kraus)

It seems only fitting that when Jackie Robinson died in 1972, he was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery. The largest of the 17 cemeteries that straddle the Queens-Brooklyn border, Cypress Hills is all-inclusive: The departed of all races, colors and creeds are buried there and in the neighboring national cemetery, where soldiers from the Revolution through the early 1900s are interred (including Pvt. Hiram Cronk, last survivor of the War of 1812, who was laid to rest in 1903 at the age of 114). The national cemetery was closed for burials by 1950.

Like many western Long Island cemeteries, Cypress Hills was created when urban development crowded out the Manhattan churchyards. With the Rural Cemetery Act of 1847 authorizing commercial burial grounds in ``rural New York,'' speculators began snapping up cheap farmland to turn into profitable cemeteries. Because the law stipulated that no cemetery organization could own more than 250 acres in one county, the shrewdest of the cemetery developers bought land bordering two counties to create larger cemeteries. So Cypress Hills, for instance, lies two-thirds in Queens, one-third in Brooklyn, appropriately intersected by the recently renamed Jackie Robinson Parkway (formerly the Interboro).

Opened in 1851, Cypress Hills received more than 35,000 bodies from Manhattan churchyards, and more cemeteries grew up around it. ``They turned Queens into the burial grounds of the city,'' says Stanley Cogan, president of the Queens Historical Society and an authority on his borough's cemeteries.

Farther east on Long Island, there was plenty of room for the departed. There were no public cemeteries in the early colonial days. Land-owning families had their own burying grounds where they also interred their servants and slaves. These tiny oases of tranquility are scattered throughout the older towns and villages, some hidden behind housing developments and shopping malls or surrounded by private property and inaccessible except through arrangement with the local historical society or landmark commission. One in Sands Point, the 1706 cemetery of the Sands family, for whom the community is named, holds the remains of seven Sands brothers who were soldiers in the Revolution and helped to finance Washington's Army.

The most famous of family burial grounds is the Youngs Memorial Cemetery in Cove Neck, created in 1658 by the Puritan Youngs family. Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, had expressed a wish to be buried in his beloved Oyster Bay. When he died in 1919, his cousin, Emlen, bought all the remaining cemetery plots plus 12 acres surrounding the Youngs Cemetery, which overlooks Oyster Bay Harbor, just a mile from T.R.'s Sagamore Hill home. Theodore Roosevelt and nearly all of his descendants are buried there. Just inside the iron gates, small wooden crosses mark the graves of slaves. It's still a working cemetery, according to its president, P. James Roosevelt, Emlen's grandson.

Harder times befell the 300-year-old Richard Cornell Cemetery in Far Rockaway, squeezed between buildings and covered with dirt and debris from a nearby demolition. Cornell, an ironmaster by trade, came to western Long Island in 1644, liked it and bought a big piece -- his domain stretched from Flushing and Cow Neck (Port Washington) on the North Shore to the Rockaway peninsula and the Five Towns on the South Shore. ``He was the Donald Trump of his day,'' says his descendant, Frances Cornell, a retired schoolteacher. (Ezra Cornell, a descendant of Richard's brother Thomas, founded Cornell University in 1868.) The Cornell cemetery is a city landmark.

Perhaps the most high-powered cemetery on Long Island is St. John's Memorial in Cold Spring Harbor, the eternal home of World War II secretary of war Henry L. Stimson, General Motors chairman Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. and CBS president William F. Paley. Meanwhile, the famous and the infamous -- from Prohibition Era gangsters to victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to war heroes and film stars, poets and prize fighters -- lie alongside ordinary citizens in some local cemeteries. Mae West (``Once I was so poor I didn't know where my next husband was coming from'') is entombed in Cypress Hills Abbey, while Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are in Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn. In Oakdale, there is Isabel Smith, who at age 19 in 1796 became one of the earliest permanent residents of the St. John's Episcopal Churchyard. Her tombstone, like many in the older cemeteries, bears a reminder of the mortality of us all: ``As I am now you soon will be . . .''

The ``weeping widow'' theme also runs through the old graveyards, usually in a tombstone inscription (``Erected by his weeping widow'') but occasionally with a sculpture of a grieving figure draped over a husband's tomb. A carved stone mourner kneels by the grave of Ehrich Weiss, better known as the escape artist Houdini, in Machpelah Cemetery in Glendale. Houdini died in 1926, promising to return. So far he hasn't.