Old Chapel, Fresh Pond Crematory
1978
Anna Goth Werner (1953 -1995)
Oil on panel, 15 1/4 X 20 1/4
Gift of the artist, 84.66.6

 

New York City's growing landmarks preservation movement encountered strong resistance in its efforts to recognize and protect sites of architectural significance in Queens during the tenure of former Borough President Donald R. Manes (1934 -1986). Historical societies and agencies in the borough persevered in proposing local structures worthy of designation as landmarks, however, and the Fresh Pond Crematory and Columbarium at Mount Olivet Crescent and 62nd Avenue in Middle Village, erected in 1893, was among a varied roster of buildings so identified by the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society.¹ Anna Goth Werner, a sympathizer with the cause of preservation, had become aware of the area's vulnerable historical fabric while pursuing her Master's in Fine Arts at Queens College in the mid-1970s. In 1978, as a visual artist participating in the Cultural Council Foundation's CETA Project, she secured funding to produce a series of nine paintings documenting notable landmarks in the Queens neighborhoods of Maspeth and Ridgewood, including this interior view of the Fresh Pond Crematory's Old Chapel.²

During the nineteenth century, New York's surging population stimulated the growth of an important regional "burial needs" industry for Queens when a succession of ordinances restricted interments in the increasingly urbanized island of Manhattan. Cemetery developers as well as churches and synagogues acquired rural acreage in Queens County and converted it into consecrated ground. By the onset of the twentieth century, a chain of cemeteries accommodating a wide spectrum of faiths punctuated the borough's suburban landscape. Their concentration along the Newtown Creek border of Queens and Brooklyn earned the area the sobriquet "City of the Dead." With them came monument works, flower shops, crematories, and other enterprises servicing memorial-park ventures. Even today, the borough retains a greater, more ethnically and theologically diverse concentration of cemeteries than any other in New York City.

Werner spent two weeks studying each location recorded in the Ridgewood series, sometimes standing on a folding table to gain a better perspective of the distinctive light and social atmosphere of the space. At Fresh Pond's Columbarium, she was surrounded by a silence she described as warm, reflective, and communal. "I felt encrypted as I painted," she recalled, and touched by the "sweetness of watching families come to quietly and gently place flowers, notes, lace or special objects into niches behind the glass doors."³ The psychological tone of that experience is reflected in the mellow filtered hues and hushed ambience of the crematory's chapel, with its empty chairs seeming to beckon departed spirits to sit and share a memory with their bereaved visitors. Werner cited Caneletto, Vermeer, and Vuillard as sources of inspiration for her interiors, believing that the dignified serenity of an unsung New York crematory merited the same painterly ambition and approach as a celebrated European cathedral.

Werner's Ridgewood paintings launched her interest in cityscapes, which she proceeded to develop in Manhattan and along the Hudson River waterfront during the 1980s. The series also signaled her emerging fascination with architectural spaces that she perceived as fugitive, despite their apparent substantiality, because of the inevitable changes in occupancy, public use, or governing aesthetic taste. Designer showrooms, corporate offices, and architect-commissioned art galleries were some of the "temporal" subjects outside the can-on of remarkable places that Werner documented in more than fifty paintings using the classic medium of oil over egg-emulsion glazed panel.⁴

Notes:

  1  An unpretentious cremation facility was built at Fresh Pond in 1884 as one of the earliest projects of the United States Cremation Company. A newer, larger marble and brick crematory, officially known as the Fresh Pond Crematory, replaced it in 1893, with the transition marked by an elaborate dedication ceremony. See A Brief Outline of the History of the United States Cremation Company (Middle Village, Queens Borough, New York, 1936). Modern efforts to make the Fresh Pond Crematory an official New York City landmark were halted by its trustees, who wished to preserve their freedom to modify and enlarge the facility. It is, however, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  2  Other subjects in the series include the interior of the Ridgewood Savings Bank, the Queen Ann Cottage Gate House at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, a parsonage in Maspeth, the Cox House in Maspeth, the George Schwartz House in Glendale, and several street scenes in Ridgewood and Middle Village, Queens (acc. nos. 84.66.1 -.8), all donated to the Museum of the City of New York by the artist in 1984.

  3  Werner articulated her recollections of painting these sites in a series of letters dating from May and June 1995. That summer, the Museum included her Ridgewood Savings Bank and Fresh Pond Crematory interiors in its special exhibition New York Now: Contemporary Cityscape Painting. Soon after the exhibition opened, a visitor informed the Museum of Werner's suicide that same July. By this date, the artist had been living in northern Manhattan but had shifted to health care as her primary field. The Museum Archives contain clippings, exhibition notices, and other biographical materials that suggest Werner's promise as a New York cityscape painter during the 1970s and 1980s.

  4  "The technique I used for all my works is classic egg oil emulsion under painting with full oil over glaze similar to Canaletto and Vermeer and some of Vuillard's work," Werner noted (letter in Museum Archives, June 6, 1995). In 1983 her painting Showroom by Michael Graves was borrowed for the Museum's special exhibition Painting New York (October 4, 1993 -April 1, 1984).