PARK AND CEMETERY. 
233 
THE HECKER MAUSOLEUM, WOODWARD LAWN 
CEMETERY, DETROIT, MICH. 
The Hecker mausoleum, erected in Woodward 
Lawn cemetery, Detroit, Mich,, was designed by 
Messrs. McKim, Mead & White, architects. New 
York City, and is constructed on the exterior of a 
high grade of white Vermont marble. It is very 
attractively located on a lot 135 feet in diameter, 
which is the center of the circular drive terminating 
a main avenue from the entrance of the cemetery, 
and it is so situated that it can never be exposed to 
the detrimental effects of neighboring inappropri- 
ate stone work. 
The illustrations clearly show the main features 
of design and construction. It is roofed with cop- 
per, and in the interior, the sides, floor and ends to 
springing line of vaulted ceiling, are executed in 
Tennessee marble. The ceilings and ends are dec- 
orated with mosaic, with medallions of various col- 
ored foreign marbles. 
The catacombs on the two sides as well as be- 
low the floor are constructed of heavy slate slabs 
and Tiffany glazed brick. The mausoleum is lighted 
by a beautiful window set in a circular bay, shown 
in illustration, protected by heavy ornate bronze 
grilles. Bronze doors of fine design guard the en- 
trance. 
The stone work leading to the entrance is also 
given in the front view. Four carved marble vases 
flank the walk and two large carved consoles are 
prominent architectural details at the entrance. On 
the plate on the opposite page is given a front view 
of the mausoleum on the upper part, and rear and 
interior views on the lower. The bronze work was 
carried out by the Crescent Brass and Iron Works 
of Detroit. 
The planting is strictly formal; masses of Siber- 
ian Arbor Vitae are used in connection with the 
two consoles and at cheek blocks of steps. The 
intention is to trim the arbor vitm hedge-like with 
square tops, sides and ends. Irish junipers are 
planted on either side of the walk, in a straight line 
at regular intervals, with a group of Spirae Van 
Houttei at either end. 
In a semi-circle around the rear of the building 
and evenly spaced, are eight Lombardy poplars, 
with an irregular belt of shrubbery planted where 
the terrace merges into the general lot grade. 
Varieties of golden bell, lilacs, Japan snowball, 
deutzia, and hydrangea are planted in this belt. 
The effect of the planting so necessary to set off 
such a memorial can be appreciated from the illus- 
trations, and likewise the advisability of setting 
such a memorial in a lot of sufficient area to dis- 
play its character. 
CEMETERIES AS THEY ARE AND AS THEY MIGHT BE 
Many people to whom age cannot wither nor custoni 
stale the cadaverous look of a cemetery, spare their 
sensibilities by keeping out of cemeteries as much as 
they can, and accept their existence as unsightly 
necessities. But is their unsightly existence necessary? 
And if it can be modified, is it not most important that 
it should be? Even in its present forbidding state, the 
cemetery is a resort for those who have time and desire 
for a little fresh air, and feelings not made of such 
penetrable stuff as to be daunted by mere bristling arrays 
of tombstones. They wander around and find a mys- 
terious pleasure in reading scores of names and dates 
and obituary facts and genealogies of people unknown 
to them, and are probably quite satisfied. Then they 
come home with a sense of having had an outing and a 
little mild intellectual exercise. If the burying ground 
were of the old-fashioned kind in which the survivors 
had exerted themselves to record their testimony to the 
qualities of the deceased and their own peculiar literary 
bent, this interest in tombstones would be more easy to 
understand. But jteople are getting to confine them- 
selves more and more to dates, names, and facts, with 
probably a text from scripture, and to bestow their 
poetical and imaginative work on the U cal paper. The 
unmoved contemplation of things ugly or repellant in 
any way is sure to have its eff jct on the character; and 
though they who wander among the tombs do not know 
it, their moral keenness has been to some extent blunted 
and their perceptions injured. They are less highly 
organized when they come out than when they went in; 
for without some dulling of the sensibilities, no one 
can learn to regard quite serenely those gaunt legions 
of stone sentinels, all unlike yet so monotonous in their 
likeness, all together yet with no kind of union, all so 
cunningly hewn and squared and polished, yet so crude 
and savage, with a ghastliness about them to which our 
simple ancestors who set up Stonehenges and cairns to 
their dead of rocks hewn by the air and water alone, 
could never attain. It is as though the fable of Cadmus 
wherein teeth were sowed to come up men had been 
reversed, and the men had been sown to come up drag- 
ons’ teeth. The custom which can inure people’s 
minds to the average cemetery must be powerful indeed, 
and the Christian faith in the power of the body to one 
day rise from under those superincumbent masses of 
stone, would seem to be quite impregnable. 
New cemeteries are being made and old ones ex- 
tended, and so long as population increases so will the 
cemeteries, until we cease to entrust our dead to the 
soil. Are we to go on indefinitely making more and 
more of the earth’s surface desolate and spectral with 
these petrified forests? Or is it necessary to devise some 
entirely new way of bestowing those whose memory we 
would wish to keep green, before we can do it without 
making their abodes into deserts of bald formalism and 
depressing monotony? The answer is no, for not only 
can ways of avoiding these things be devised, but they 
have been both devised and carried out; in no country 
so thoroughly and well as in our own, though not com- 
