Exploring Hillside Cem by Suzanne Hanney
Hillside Mayor Joseph Tamburino poses with a rotating monument; the monument at the graves of the Our Lady of Angels School Fire; the memorial for Julia Buccola Petta, "The Italian Bride" (Suzanne Hanney photos).
“All history ends at the cemetery in terms of real people, who did real things,” Hillside Mayor Joseph T. Tamburino said during his September 30 annual Insider Tour of Mount Carmel and Queen of Heaven cemeteries – the final resting place of not only Chicago cardinals, but of mobsters like Al Capone, Dean O’Banion, Frank Nitti and Anthony Accardo, and even Chicago Police Officer Ella French. Tamburino is vice president of an Standard & Poor's 500 company and has spent 43 years as mayor of Hillside, the location of both Mount Carmel and Queen of Heaven, Catholic cemeteries at Wolf and Roosevelt Roads near the Eisenhower Expressway. However, his recollections of the cemeteries date to when he was 6 years old. His father and “paisans” (Italian slang for “brother” or “fellow countryman”), as Tamburino called them, worked planting flowers on graves at Mount Carmel, and it was his job as a boy to water them. Tamburino started giving informal tours to friends about 20 years ago. His executive assistant, Evelyn Belmonte, who is also village event planner, finally suggested that he make them official.
COVER STORY
He stresses not only history, but art, religion, and Chicago culture. Mount Carmel and Queen of Heaven have the graves of numerous victims of Chicago tragedies such as the Iroquois Theater Fire, the Eastland Disaster, and most significantly, the Our Lady of the Angels School Fire.
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The Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903 killed 602 people after a stage light ignited a stage curtain and people were unable to escape. The Eastland Disaster is Chicago’s greatest loss-oflife catastrophe; 844 people died when an excursion boat for a Western Electric company picnic rolled over in the Chicago River in July 1915. But the Our Lady of the Angels School Fire of Dec. 1, 1958, which killed 92 children and three nuns, drew murmurs of recollection from people on the trolley tour. A memorial listing the victims’ names and the cemeteries where they are buried is located at a triangular intersection. Several more graves – of children as young as 10 – are situated in front of it, safeguarded by a relief sculpture of the Virgin Mary, flanked by angels. It’s been nearly 65 years, but flowers, prayer cards, a teddy bear and photos decorated one grave on the day of the tour. Many graves were marked by angels that collect sunlight by day and that glow by night.
The fire still elicits emotional posts in social media about Chicago history. I attended kindergarten through high school with the same order of nuns that taught at Our Lady of the Angels. I can still recall the haunted expression of my kindergarten nun touching the walls of our brand-new school building and saying, “It could never happen here.” Our Lady of the Angels had been an old structure, with brick exterior walls but interior walls, stairways and roof made entirely of wood. By one account, people came home from watching fire rescue efforts, and in their grief, turned off the Christmas lights on their homes. It became too hard for families to see survivors similar in age to their own children, among other constant reminders, and so the fire accelerated the exodus of Italians from that neighborhood to western suburbs like his,
