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

The closing words to The Great Gatsby are etched into the slab in front of the monument. Despite the disappointing initial sales of the book, Max Perkins (Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner) wrote him: "The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimension and intensity of the impressions you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary."

One of my favorite monuments in Calvary Cemetery is that of 25-year-old Rose, who died in 1927.

  A cenotaph in Staten island's Moravian Cemetery memorializes Eberhard Faber. Although Faber is buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood, graves of many of Faber's family members, including his brother and his sons, are here. Faber was born into a family making pencils since 1761. In 1848, he moved to New York City, where he opened his first pencil factory on 42nd Street near the East River. Unfortunately, the factory was destroyed in a fire in 1872. The businessman built a larger factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He was the first pencil manufacturer to put rubber erasers on his pencils. Although there is a cenotaph monument in his memory, his burial place is at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

In the 1980s, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno was the boss of the Genovese crime family.He died in prison, in 1992, six years into a life sentence. Salerno is entombed in a private mausoleum in St. Raymond's Cemetery.  

    The parents of famed film director Martin Scorsese, whose hit films include Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, are entombed in a private mausoleum in Staten Island's Moravian Cemetery. Both parents, Catherine and Charles, had small roles in Goodfellas.   

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra had a successful career in Major League Baseball for 19 years. He played mostly for the Yankees but also briefly for the Mets. In addition to playing, Berra also coached and managed both teams. He is considered one of the greatest catchers in baseball history and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Berra died at the age of 90 and was laid to rest at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in New Jersey.

May Singhi Breen was known as the “The Ukulele Lady.” For three decades --the 1920s to the 1950s -- she wrote ukulele arrangements for piano sheet music. And in 1931, she was responsible for the ukulele being included in the New York Musicians’ list of musical instruments. Singhi-Breen was inducted in the Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum (yes, there is one) in 2000. She was married to composer Peter DeRose a pianist and composer, with whom she often collaborated.  

Designer Vera Wang's family rests in style in Westchester County's Kensico Cemetery.   The  Wang family memorial overlooks the Cohasset Plot, a seven acre hillside expanse which contains an abundance of decorative laser-etched monuments bearing Asian surnames. At dusk the ivory granite structure takes on a greyish hue.

J ohn L. Goldwater, the creator of Archie Comics, is buried beneath in Kensico Cemetery. His 2019 New York Times obituary noted that "He is survived by Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica in Riverdale, U.S.A."

The Mercedes-Benz monument which marks the gravesite of Ray Tse is not to be missed.