Gardens of Stone --- A Cemetery Blog by Alexandra Kathryn Mosca

  This summer I finally made it to East Hampton to visit Green River Cemetery. It had been on my list of cemeteries to visit for a long time. And while I'd read a lot about it, and included it in an article I wrote for  Newsday  about tombstone tourism on Long Island, seeing it was something else. Many of the graves are marked by boulders, rather than  tombstones. It may have been a traditional begun by Artist Jackson Pollo ck, and his wife Lee Krasner. Actor Peter Boyle, too, chose a boulder to mark his final resting place. As does Steven J. Ross, the former CEO of Time Warner.  The tragic deaths of brother and sister Courtney and Robert Steel stopped me in my tracks. Courtney was killed by a drunk driver less than two years after her brother died of cancer at the age of 19. 

  Green River Cemetery, in East Hampton, is filled with out-of-the-ordinary styles of memorialization.  These film reels mark the grave of Stan VanDerBeek, an acclaimed independent film maker.  Talk about unique! Two of his major works were included in the exhibit 'The American Independent Cinema: 1958-1964'' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1984, the year VanDerBeek died.

Green River Cemetery, located in East Hampton, is one of the cemeteries I included in a 2019 article I did for Newsday about tombstone tourism on Long Island, for Newsday. While only three acres, there is an eclectic group of people buried here, and for many of them, boulders serve as tombstones. The grave of actor Peter Boyle, of 'Young Frankenstein' and 'Everyone Loves Raymond' fame is one example.

I recently learned that comedian Jackie Mason, who died last year, was buried on Long Island. Yesterday, I had an opportunity to stop at the cemetery. His monument, on a main road, is large, impressive, and well-visited. What I was especially taken by were the words his wife had inscribed on the monument, and the smaller stone in front of it. In the 1980s, Mason had a show on Broadway, which I attended with a mutual friend. After the show, the three of us had dinner together. Mason was just as funny in private, as he was on stage.