Tour review

We went on a tour of Lake View Cemetery this weekend that was titled “Angels and Sculptures.” While some of what was covered was interesting, I have to warn anyone considering the tour that it is not precisely as advertised. The tour guide, whose name I cannot remember, works for the Cleveland Museum of Art and seemed to be extremely knowledgeable. Part of the problem was that she started out with background knowledge of architecture and art of the period of the Garfield monument to prepare us for the angels that we were going to see – for 45 minutes of a tour scheduled for two hours. I don’t think I would have minded if the information on artistic styles and movements had been provided in little bits as we were moving around the cemetery, but it was presented as a big long lecture while we craned our necks up to see what she was discussing on the Garfield monument.

There are four angels with the points of the compass on the ceiling of the Garfield monument, and at the one hour mark of the tour, they were the only angels we had seen. In total, we only visited 6 sites in two hours – the angels on the ceiling of the Garfield monument, 4 other sculpted angels, and the statues of the mourners I showed last Friday. (The mourners at the Peck monument are not angels, but I am willing to give that a pass since they are such cool statues.)

I don’t know how many additional angels I would have seen if I had followed the tour to its conclusion, because after 6 sites we had reached the end of the two hours. She did offer to continue the tour for anyone who wanted to continue, but she hadn’t shown me any sculptures I couldn’t have found or understood on my own, so we peeled off from the tour and did some exploring of our own.

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