Queer Thing, 'bout Undertakers' Shops

________________________________________________
Title:     Queer Thing, 'bout Undertakers' Shops
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

Queer thing, that, about undertakers' shops! I don't remember to have been struck by undertakers' shops in San Francisco. Maybe they have none there--because, as you'll see, it's a queer thing about them.

Now in Indianapolis undertaking is a very fashionable affair. People there, apparently, want "class" in the matter of being finally disposed of. They believe, evidently, with the author of the popular little idyl, "Urn Burial," that "Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the tomb."

The most aristocratic street in that city is named North Meridian Street. A street, until a short time ago, entirely of stately lawns and patrician homes--mansions. Of late, a little business, shops of the most distinguished character, has been creeping up this street from down-town. Notably, de luxe motor car salesrooms, studios of highly æsthetic photographers, and particularly palatial undertaking establishments. They are, these last, wondrous halls, which surely none could enter but those who (in life) had been rich in treasure. Features of the city are they--"sights."

But here's the riddle:

Strolling about New York, from river to river, uptown and down, one might readily fancy that here only the poor pass out of the world. Or that if the rich and fashionable ever die their bodies are mysteriously spirited away to destinations unknown; or are secretly preserved (presumably by some taxidermal process) in their homes.

Why? Well, where on Fifth Avenue is an undertaker's? True, a man I know declares there is a single one there. I am unable to find it. Where on any fine street of the metropolis? Why, yes; as a rare phenomenon. You do know, of course, that enormous place on upper Broadway. Sign says branches in Paris, London, Berlin, Petrograd.

Viewed through the great windows interior presents somewhat the effect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In foreground large harp, equally huge Chinese vase--probably of the Tang Wang period, on great marble pedestal enormous bronze of a mounted Diana repelling with spear attack of ferocious animal resembling tiger. Appropriateness of this sculpture somewhat puzzling. On wall, somewhat further within, immense tapestry. One door labelled "Delivery Entrance." All of this, of course, is magnificence as much as even the most covetous would crave.

But in New York this august undertaking hall is an anachronism. Here, for some reason mysterious, it is in shabby neighborhoods that the "parlors" of undertakers abound. You may find them sprinkled all about the lower East Side. Frequent on Hudson Street, and, say, on Varick. Quaint and curious places, these. Very human in their appeal. Tiny places, most of them.

One such cozy crib I know on Greenwich Avenue. Has a stained glass screen in the window, suggesting a good deal the style of window ornamentation popular with that American institution lately deceased--the saloon. The social spirit rife in small undertaking shops, at least in some of them, is pleasant to observe. Business there not being pressing, and life moving in these inns of death in a leisurely and quiet current, neighborly amenities appear to be much cultivated.

This place of which I speak has, particularly in the evenings, much the air of a club, where choice spirits of the locality foregather to discuss politics, it may be, and the more engrossing forms of sport, such as boxing. And perhaps relish a little game at cards. I often pass this place at night and feel a warmth of spirit at the hum of jovial social contact within.

I like, too, the way the undertakers' shops of the humble and obscure carry on cheek by jowl with the familiar, homely, friendly things of life. This gives Death a neighborly sort of air. On my walks in that quarter I always give a friendly glance to the windows of a "Cremation Ass'n" on Eighth Avenue, on one side of it a delicatessen shop, on the other a "loan office," in the basement below a plumber.

Attractive, too, is it to consider how founders of tidy undertaking houses have become personages and are held in revered esteem. For they are not, it would seem, like unto those who have established just ordinary businesses. This I will show you:

At a corner of Twenty-third Street, over a telegraph office, is an establishment of some caste. Window legend reads: "Undertakers--Cremations--Night and Day--Interments in all Cemeteries." The last phrase reminds me of the way my old friend James Huneker used to date his letters to me from Brooklyn. They began, "Flatbush by the C--emeteries." But that's not the point. It's a pity the alert English writer who recently visited us and discovered a statue of General Grant in Grant Park, overlooking the Blackstone (where nobody had ever seen one before), and that the huge bust of Washington Irving in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, was an effigy of Father George Washington--it's a rotten shame E. V. Lucas missed this corner while here.

Because when you go round this corner you are to look up just above the level of your head. (Though I'm afraid you neglect to do this.) There on a ledge is a grand sight. It's a bust of God. Fact! Anyhow, looks just like pictures of God William Blake used to make. Old gentleman. Noble brow. Patriarchal beard, flowing out in a pattern of rhythmical waves--most realistically mildewed by time and weather.... But, no; inquiry reveals that it's a likeness of the founder of this "old established" undertaking concern.

Then there's that place a short step down Eighth Avenue. It declares on its sign that it is the "original" house bearing the name of the Reverend gentleman who conducts it. When you look through the glass in the door you view just within, displayed on an ornamental easel, a life-size crayon portrait, enlarged from a photograph, of a distinguished-looking person wearing brown Dundreary whiskers and a top hat. One corner of the portrait is gracefully draped in an American flag.

Yes; you'd be surprised how strong undertakers are on patriotism. Hard by here, next door to a dentist advertising "painless extraction," you find a firm of "Funeral Directors" where conspicuous among such ornaments as tall, bronze lamps with big shades, a spittoon, a little model of a casket and an urn, is a large bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln. A plate says: "No Charge for Rooms or Chapels for Funerals." And above stairs is seen a row of somewhat ecclesiastical stained-glass windows. Though we are given to understand by an advertisement that the atmosphere of these chapels is "non-sectarian."

Then over on Third Avenue (where there are lots and lots of undertakers) is a place. Always sitting just within the doorway, very silent, a stout, very solemn individual wearing a large, black derby hat and big, round, green-lens spectacles. Above him on the wall a framed lithograph in colors of George Washington--beside it a thermometer. In the window a rubber-plant. Rubber-plants varying in size from infant to elephant are in the windows of all undertakers. The symbolism of this decoration I know not. Beside the plant an infant's white casket, proclaimed by a poster which leans against it to be composed of "purity metal." In some places the casket, perhaps not of purity metal, is protected by being enclosed in a glass case. The name of the proprietor of this shop, as given on his sign, ends in "skey." Set in the door-frame is the usual "Night Bell." And, as always in undertakers' shops, the card of a "notary public" is displayed. Next door "Family Shoes" are featured.

Only yesterday afternoon I was looking in at the window of an undertaker on Second Avenue, one I had just found. Along the curb before the door a string of rather frayed and wobbly-looking "hacks," with a rusty-black hearse at the head. Horses to these vehicles drowsy in disposition, moth-eaten in effect as to pelt, and in the visibility of their anatomical structure suggesting that they might have been drawn by Albert Dürer in some particularly melancholy mood.

In groups along the edge of the sidewalk, conversing in subdued tones, the Dickensesque drivers of this caravan. Tall and gaunt, some; short and stout, others. Skirt coat on one, "sack" coat on another. Alike in this: frayed and rusty and weather-beaten, all. And hard, very hard of countenance. Each topped by a very tall, and quite cylindrical hat of mussed, shoddy-black, plush texture. Hangovers, so to say, these figures, from New York's hansom-cab days, or the time in London of the "four-wheeler."

No, not altogether. There was something piquant--Villonesque, or jovial--Rabelaisian, about the pickpockets of that tribe. These solemn mummers strike a ghoulish note. But at the same time, out here in the sane and cheerful sunlight, they don't look real. Create an odd impression. Strikes you as about as queer, this bunch, as if a lot of actors from a melodrama should turn up in the street with their makeup on and gravely pretend to belong to real life.

"Perhaps," I thought, "there is a funeral, or something, going on inside, and I should not be gaping in at this window."

Out of doorway pops little, rotund man, oily countenance. "Are you looking for anybody?" he asks.

"Here," I said inwardly, "is where I get moved on." No, I told him, I was just observing his window.

"Ah!" he cried, immensely flattered. He waved his hand back toward a couple of little, marble crosses with hearts carved in relief on the base. "You don't often see that, do you? Do you, now? They're sixty years old. Made out of a single piece!"

But the saddest thing about undertakers' shops is to go by where was one long familiar to you and find it gone. There was a splendid little place which it was a great consolation to me to admire. That building is now given over to an enterprise called "The Goody Shop." Its lofty dignity and deep eloquence are gone! It looks like a department store. It is labelled, with the blare of a brass band, "The Home of Pussy Willow Chocolates."

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Queer Thing, 'bout Undertakers' Shops

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN