A&E

NYC's Starry Woodlawn Cemetery An Overlooked Cultural Gem

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cumella, dressed in 1920s garb, laid his old Victrola record player down among the tombstones and turned to the small tour group assembled under the towering trees at Woodlawn Cemetery.

“She was the diva of her day. The Beyoncé of her day,” he said, brushing leaves off the modest stone commemorating vaudeville star Nora Bayes.

The group had to lean in toward the old windup Victrola to hear Bayes' big voice, necessary in the age before microphones, belting her biggest hit, 1917’s “Over There.”

The song's author, George M. Cohan, was also honored on this tour of jazz and vaudeville greats buried at Woodlawn, a grand old cemetery and arboretum in the heart of the Bronx. Cohan and his family lie in an imposing mausoleum with Tiffany stained-glass windows.

Other stops included the resting places of jazz pioneers W.C. Handy and King Oliver; dancers Irene and Vernon Castle; comedian Bert Williams; and, at a crossroads known as “Jazz Corner,” Duke Ellington, surrounded by Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton and others.

The tour ended at the grave of Irving Berlin, where the old Victrola played “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

“They called it ragtime, but it’s really proto-jazz,” says Cumella, who DJs and had a long-running radio show under the name Phonograph DJ MAC.

“Musicians and artists gravitated here, aspired to be here,” he said.

The Jazz Age musical greats are just one of the reasons a visit to Woodlawn can be fascinating.

Its 400 acres are the resting place of many influential people. including authors (Herman Melville, Dorothy Parker, E.L. Doctorow); business leaders (J.C. Penney, F.W. Woolworth, Madam C.J. Walker); women's rights pioneers (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt); musical stars from other eras (Celia Cruz); artists, mayors, civil rights leaders, journalists and more.

Other walking and trolley tours cover themes such as Black, Irish, Italian and women’s history. Recent events sponsored by the Woodlawn Conservancy included a tour of resting places of passengers on the Titanic.

In addition, the non-denominational cemetery is a trove of funerary art and shady, hilly beauty. Its trees include several specimens recognized by New York City as “Great Trees.” The cemetery can feel far removed from the busy city blocks around it.

As Bronx green spaces go, Woodlawn is something of an undiscovered gem compared to the better-known Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Garden nearby. (The cemetery is easy to reach by public transportation, too, with Woodlawn stops on the subway and Metro North Railroad.)

There are grand, castle-like mausoleums with statuary and stained glass, and also modest, flat gravestones. The cemetery and its crematorium remain active; people are still buried there.

Woodlawn was founded by a group of wealthy New Yorkers in 1863 in a spot easily accessible from Manhattan. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011, “a popular final resting place for the famous and powerful.”

Cumella was a fan of early popular music living in New York City when he realized so many of his musical heroes were lying in the ground at Woodlawn. He started visiting the gravestones with his friends, and soon, he says, the Conservancy helped him set up his jazz and vaudeville trolley tours.

“I'm a big advocate for letting people see and hear what it was like to be a music listener 100 years ago," he says.

His tour involves a little time travel. The Victrola that Cumella sets up at every stop plays 78 r.p.m. records and is powered by a spring. He times himself with a vintage pocket watch, and amplifies his voice with an old-fashioned acoustic megaphone, like a director in an old movie.

He tries to keep the legacy of the era’s artists alive; Bayes, for example, actually had no headstone at Woodlawn until Cumella led an effort that got her one in 2018.

Lauren Hinton, who teaches second grade in New York City, took a recent tour and hopes to incorporate the music and musicians into her lessons.

“We learned to tap dance last year,” she says, noting that Harold Nicholas, one half of the famous dancing pair the Nicholas Brothers, is buried in an unmarked grave at Woodlawn. Efforts are underway to buy him a headstone.

“It’s important for people to know about the past so they (artists) don’t fall into obscurity,” she said.

Also on the trolley were Nancy Gerstman and Bruce Goldstein, filmmakers from Manhattan.

“I loved hearing the music, and putting all those people into context. People I wouldn’t have known about, and now I want to know more about them,” said Gerstman.

Woodlawn is a trove of cultural history, he said: “This is one of the wonders of New York.”

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Hemingway Look-Alike Contest Returns To The Florida Keys

KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) — The 40th edition of an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest opened Thursday night at an iconic Key West bar once frequented by the author, marking the return of a contest canceled last year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Some 70 stocky, bearded men resembling the late writer competed in the first of two preliminary rounds at Sloppy Joe’s Bar. The contest’s second preliminary round is set for Friday and the 2021 winner is to be chosen Saturday night.

The three-night contest is a cornerstone of the island’s Hemingway Days festival, staged around the literary legend’s July 21 birthday to salute his writing talent, legacy and adventurous life. Hemingway lived and wrote on the subtropical island for most of the 1930s.

Thursday night’s entrants paraded across Sloppy Joe’s stage before a judging panel of former winners including Joe Maxey, a retired Tennessee banker who won the last contest, staged in 2019.

Late Wednesday, a woman from Somerville, Massachusetts, was named the winner of the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Madison Bakalar’s “So This Is How We Go” bested 784 other American and international entries.

Lorian Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s author granddaughter and founder of the literary competition, said Bakalar’s story impressed the judges for its ability to combine universally human emotions about loss with a finessed gallows humor.

Hemingway Days continues through Sunday with events including an offbeat “Running of the Bulls” spoof, a literary walking tour and the Key West Marlin Tournament.

While living in Key West, Hemingway penned classics including “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “To Have and Have Not.”