A Temple Tomb for a Robber Baron

This is Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Along with Greenwood over in Brooklyn, it's one of New York City's two great 19th-century rural cemeteries, designed to be places of contemplation, relaxation, and, for the elite, display. Here we have the most splendid of the cemetery's many temple mausoleums, built for robber baron Jay Gould. Let's get a bit closer. Jay Gould became infamous throughout America in 1869, when his attempts to corner the gold market triggered the Black Friday Panic. Later in life, he became a railway magnate and cornered large parts of the rail network, making him very wealthy and very unpopular. When he died in 1892, he was extremely rich, rich enough to spend $150,000 in 1892 dollars on this mausoleum and the plot around it. That worked out to almost four million in today's money. As you can see, it is an ionic building, modeled in fact on the Erechtheion in Athens. It has 30 columns and is peripteral. In fact, it rather resembles one of the treasuries you'd see at Delphi. The columns are a bit too close together, but the effect is quite impressive. And the whole thing, despite Gould's own unsavory career, was an impressive evocation of a time in American history when the classics were often evoked in this way. Gould was interred here, along with his family, and at the time of their own demises. But his own receptacle was still shut with lead, as any one of his many enemies disturbed his rest in this splendid mausoleum.