One Church, One Graveyard

There are always good stories in the New York Times' Sunday City Section, but the May 27 issue had two particularly good ones.

One is an account of the last Sunday service at the Mary Help of Christians Roman Catholic Church on East 12th Street in the East Village, which lets you know what's being lost with the Archdiocese of New York's recent rash of church closings. I never went inside Mary Help of Christians. Now I wish I had.

The second story is about Woodlawn Cemetary, New York's other famous cemetery, after the more celebrated Green-Wood in Brooklyn. It's about the recent transfer of the the cemetery's huge archives to Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, stuff most scholars have never seen before. The prose by reporter Laura Shaine Cunningham ("The love shimmers off the cream-colored stationery." "I can almost hear the faint sounds of `When the Saints Go Marching In.' So many will want to be in that number.") is much too flowery (you didn't need to tart up this tale, Laura), and that headline "Romancing the Stones" really needs to be retired for good, but the story's still a engrossing one.