Reflection Journal

Kimberly Ziccardi
Spring Grove Colloqium
Hunley, Marcha
13 August 2009

This week, like all of the others I was blown away by Spring Grove Cemetery. While listening to the last of the presentations on other cemeteries compared to Spring Grove, it just reiterated the fact that Spring Grove is definitely superior in just about every aspect. There is beautiful landscape with a very diverse amount of plants and flowers. This helps ease the feeling of being in a creepy cemetery. It has almost like a park feeling to it. There are always people there, either by taking a tour, visiting a lost loved one, or just visiting and observing. There is clearly substantially less effort placed in many of the surrounding Cincinnati cemeteries. Besides them being quite smaller and bland when speaking of landscape, they are also not very pleasant places to be. The tomb stones were breaking and grass was overgrowing them. It is appalling to think that people could even be as careless as to miss-mark tomb stones and then proceed to try to burry bodies over existing occupied grave sites.

The walk about through the cemetery was also nice. I have never really seen a sphinx much less one so big made into a representation of a tomb stone. The tall mausoleum was also a very new experience. Although a little creepy it was nice to actually be able to walk inside the gates and get to see what one was like. The architecture was absolutely extraordinary. I still remember noticing the building around the second week of class. It is very beautiful and eye catching. It was definitely a shame that the second floor was rotted out and we weren’t able to go up there but I could easily picture the rows of pews used by the family to worship those lost below them. It is a very personal and intimate type of place to build and definitely shows the amount of respect love and money that family shared with one another. The whole experience was one I will never forget.