Mountain View Cemetery

21 June 2009

I love where we live. But what does it say about this area when the most beautiful open space within (easy) walking distance is a cemetery?

Okay, you can't fly a kite or play frisbee there. But it is a great place for walking, once one gets past the macabre feeling of recreating with the bones of our local ancestors.

The edge of the cemetery abuts the edge of our neighborhood. But the cemetery management people don't like the idea of uncontrolled entry onto the grounds. So they have put a fence around the entire property. The formal entry gate is almost 4 km from our house by road.

For years, there has been a battle simmering between the cemetery management people and our neighbors. The fence is repaired and reinforced by one side. A new hole appears. The fence is repaired again with "no trespassing" signs added. Another hole appears. And so it goes.

For California, the cemetery is old. It was established in 1863. Its designer was Frederick Law Olmsted, the same landscape architect responsible for the layout of New York's Central Park, the grounds of the US Capital Building, and Stanford University (Go Bears! Beat Stanford!)

Scattered around the grounds are a variety of statues. Some I love, like the angel at the bottom. Others I just have to scratch my head over, like the sphinx-like creatures in the photo at the top.

Parting shots

2 June 2009

So, for the first half of 2009, my travels included these adventures:
early January -- the tail end of an extended-family trip to Idaho
mid January -- begin an 11 week stay in Costa Rica
mid April -- begin a six-week stay in Spain
late May -- two days in Copenhagen
later May and early June -- six days in Hamburg

Now, it is time to return home.

As we leave Hamburg, Germany, Europe, here are a few last looks.

Stolpersteine

1 June 2009

In Hamburg, we are guests of Alexis' employers, staying in their large home in a lovely residential district that is in the heart of the city. The houses here are stately multistory units that stand contiguously along quiet, tree-lined avenues. The nearest station accessing Hamburg's excellent metro system is only a few blocks away. The Alster is also close by, offering recreational opportunities. We've walked 10 minutes each morning to bakeries to buy fresh German bread. Ingrid and I also enjoyed a superb Indian dinner last night at a restaurant that was only a 15 minute walk from this house.

It is incomprehensible to think that it was not many decades ago -- really only an eye blink in the span of human history -- when the horrors of the Jewish genocide were occurring in Europe. And these terrors were not happening in some vague, across the Atlantic, far away, alien Europe. No, in fact, lives were destroyed among those living here in this neighborhood.

"Stolpersteine" is German for "stumbling block." It is also the name of a project of artist Gunter Demnig as a way to commemorate the holocaust. It is being carried out by creating and placing small bronze plaques on sidewalks in front of houses where Jews lived who were destroyed by the Holocaust.

The other pictures in this post show three of the many stolpersteine that I have seen walking around this neighborhood in Hamburg. The project is an international effort and apparently Demnig has placed 13,000 (as of late 2007) of these plaques in 280 cities. And this is a tiny fraction of the number of lives destroyed in the Holocaust.

The first of these has this translation: "Here lived Werner Glückstadt. Year of birth 1925. Deported 1942 from Drancy. Murdered in Auschwitz." [Drancy was a transit camp located outside of Paris.]