Goin' to Graceland

TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

"Graceland" by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)
Photo: The mausoleum of Potter Palmer and Bertha Honoré Palmer,(Wikipedia,©Jeremy Atherton, 2006)


I've always wanted to live in Chicago. Specifically, I've wanted to live in one of the condominiums at 330 S. Michigan Ave. (I believe they are in the McCormick building designed by Holabird and Roche and completed in 1910.) Since I have rather limited means, this is not going to be an option. So, being reluctant to give up my dream of spending my final days in Chicago, I began to think about Graceland Cemetery. We are all going to "shuffle off this mortal coil" at some point so if I can't spend my days in Chicago now, other than to visit, why not later! Lots cheaper than a condo, and couldn't ask for better company: the Palmers, Marshall Field, Louis Sullivan, Carter Harrison, etc., etc.

George Pullman is there, too, but no one will talk to him.

From the Graceland website:

If you decide to sit and rest at the Pullman exedra (which means it has seats) you might well use the time to ponder what’s between you and George Pullman, the famous inventor of the sleeping car and the infamous landlord of his workers.

Solon Beman, who built Pullman’s feudally run town, designed the stately Corinthian column. But what’s underground is more interesting: Pullman’s coffin, covered in tarpaper and asphalt, is sunk in a concrete block the size of a room. On top of the block lie railroad ties and even more concrete. Why so secure? The family feared that Pullman’s angry workers, whose wages were cut while their rents remained the same, would resort to skullduggery at the gravesite.

Honestly, I'm not being macabre. I'm intrigued and excited about the possibility. Just a thought, so I've added a new set of links on Graceland Cemetery in the left column. Can't say I'm dying to get there real soon...