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

  The Van Ness Parsons pyramid-shaped monument, in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, is a most fitting final resting place for amateur Egyptologist Albert Ross Parsons. It is also a perennial  favorite of mine to photograph. Here is how it looked on a recent spring day.  From the late 19th century, into the early 20th century, Egyptian Revival was a popular style in memorialization. The Van Ness Parsons mausoleum is one of the finest examples, with its mix of Egyptian, Christian, and mystical symbolism.

Egyptian Revival architecture was a popular style of memorialization during the mid-19th Century. This fashionable trend resurgence occurred in the 1920s,1920's presumably because of the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb. Albert Ross Parsons (1847-1933), a composer, musician, author, and pyramid expert, published The New Light from the Pyramids in 1893. Fittingly, this Egyptologist is entombed along with several family members in this pyramid-shaped mausoleum, which combines Christian religious statuary and Egyptian symbolism, My book Green-Wood Cemetery ( Arcadia Publishing, 2008) includes an archival shot of this Egyptian Revival mausoleum.