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

  In 2003, it became big news when it was discovered that a fully-grown Bengal tiger was living in a New York City apartment. The 400-pound feline, named Ming, was the pet of an eccentric cab driver who brought him home as a six-week-old cub. Ming was sent to Noah’s Lost Ark, Inc., a sanctuary for exotic animals in rural Ohio, where he roamed free. After he  died in 2019, the sanctuary contacted  Hartsdale Pet Cemetery about the possibility of interring him. However, transporting the tiger became an impossibility, so Ming was cremated. In April of that year a large urn containing his cremated remains was interred in Hartsdale Pet Cemetery following a brief ceremony.    To learn more about Ming's life:   A Farewell to Ming, the Siberian-Bengal Tiger Who Spent Three Years in a Harlem Apartment

  "A Pocket of Peace," a profile of Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, in Westchester, New York, is the cover story for November's American Cemetery & Cremation magazine.  It was a delight to learn more about this very special place, and to see the outpouring of love at every turn.

  The graves of the Prentiss brothers lie side by side in the shadow of the Historic Chapel near tranquil Valley Water. During the Civil War, the brothers from Maryland fought on separate sides. Both were mortally wounded in the same attack. The storied poet Walt Whitman ministered to both brothers and later wrote about them. In 2008, new gravestones, courtesy of the Veterans Administration, were unveiled in front of the Prentiss brother's illegible 19th-century marble gravestones.

  Sandy was the beloved pet dog of a Bronx real estate developer. For her eternal resting place, he decided to have a small replica of his family mausoleum built in Hartsdale Pet Cemetery. Constructed of Barre granite, it sports a bronze door with a handle in the shape of an S. The developer has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to give her a last special gift."

Ten years after I first saw the mausoleum of  hotel I returned for another visit.   The mausoleum, designed in 1927 by the well-known architect Franklin Naylor. Naylor considered it to be the largest and most intricate design of his career and published a pamphlet detailing the construction process. The structure, which blends Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Revival architecture, is one of the largest private mausoleums in the world.