real life rabbit holes: Hans Schuler & Loudon Park Cemetery
I have realized recently that my best quality is my curiosity - it's kind of the motor for how I approach hobbies, information-gathering, and relationships. It often manifests as an obnoxious nosiness I tamp down, or obsessing refreshing of the news. I used to deep dive Reddit profiles of people that had shared wild takes out of a need to understand the mindset of a person who had come to that conclusion.
On the more positive end, it manifests in a desire to learn and understand the world around me. We watched Gangs of New York last night and now I'm halfway through a podcast about Tammany Hall. Watching Love Island had my spouse and I deep in the world of the music industry of reality TV shows. Anything can be a portal to knowledge about something new. (This is, coincidentally, a fast-track to being a know-it-all adult, my greatest fear).
My spouse and I were walking towards an art show and passed what looked at first like a nondescript, grown-over brick Baltimore rowhome.
As we looked closer, it was covered in out-of-place looking sculpted panels and a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places:
It was a studio run by a Hans Schuler a German immigrant who studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the oldest art school in the US. He studied in France and returned back to Baltimore, where he carved and cast figurative statues while also being the president of MICA for almost 25 years. His son operated a sculpture school in the building.
His Wikipedia article mentions several statues and relief sculptures of his on view at Greenmount Cemetery as well as several at Loudon Park cemetery, one I hadn't heart of. I love cemeteries and preliminary research indicated that this one was huge. It is MASSIVE, and split into three main parts - a modern memorial field (sigh), one active 1910ish-1950s, and several sections of Very Old Graves which I am always happy to see. But first, the Schulers:
This one was my favorite, something about how her feet dangle as she reads:
(I'm not 100% sure this is Shuler's work, but it looks like his relief sculpture at Greenmount)
After checking these ones out, we hopped back in the car to see the Very Old Graves section, which was massive and jam-packed with elaborate tombstones. There is very little space for the graves to "breathe" as sculptures of their own here compared to Green Mount, but there are also just so many.
This one is so tall, that the top of my head came up to that second "step" at the base. Photos do not do justice to how very big this monument is. It was for a German family with lots of carved wheat motifs, leading me to think they were brewers.
Entering the Very Old part winds you on a path past this massive mausoleum built into the side of a hill. I would have thought it was a chapel without the word "MAUSOLEUM" etched into the side of it (worth zooming in for the typeface alone), and it was in rough shape. A stone at the top says 1873.
We stepped closer to peek in. Plaster and lathe from a wall had fallen in, and the stained glass windows separating the antechamber from (presumably) the tombs were smashed.
As we looked, an older gent drove by and stopped to tell us it was built in 1873, which we had noted. He said he was sad about the vandalism, and that many of the mausoleums had had gates removed and stained glass smashed. He said he was born and raised in Baltimore, but had sold his house because "it's so hard to keep up with" at 86. "September 6, I was born" he fit in, and we wished him a happy birthday. He said he drives through the cemetery every day looking at the deer and the foxes, that it was a peaceful place to kill time. "Pretty, too."
Spending time in cemeteries is a weird thing, I guess, but I'm glad he could spend his birthday talking to another cemetery lurker. Cheers, Hans Shuler.