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Photos by Byron Kerman
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From the outside, the Wainwright Tomb looks as if it contains a tidy roomful of secrets. The Byzantine dome that crowns the concrete-and-limestone box makes it like no other mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery, and perhaps anywhere.
Its grand yet restrained architectural statement comes from American architectural giant Louis Sullivan. He designed the tomb in 1892 at the behest of his big patron, St. Louis brewer and millionaire Ellis Wainwright.
The tomb was not originally for Mr. Wainwright, but for his bride, Charlotte. She died young, at age 34 of peritonitis, and the Wainwright tomb has been called a mini Taj Mahal, another grand edifice erected by a grieving widower to his wife after her truncated life, in the name of undying love. Wainwright later joined his wife under the tomb’s marble floor, in 1924.
If you stroll through the endless grounds and the endless fascination that is Bellefontaine, you will no doubt wonder what it’s like inside the various mausoleums. Some of them have windows, and many visitors to the cemetery, myself included, have tromped across the grass to try to get a peek inside.
The Wainwright tomb was one of the “biggies.” With its typically intense Sullivan filigree on the outside, its listing on the National Register of Historic Places (since1970), that funky dome, and the cryptic, arguably haughty touch of no family name engraved on the exterior, cemetery aficionados had to wonder what architectural (and metaphysical) secrets awaited within.
Then, in 2008, a team of architects and artisans restored the aging 116-year-old tomb, inside and out. Not long after, the Wainwright family descendants agreed to allow the occasional tour group to poke around inside.
Earlier this month, the St. Louis Beacon sponsored its second annual Beacon Festival of the arts, featuring a lecture on Sullivan and Wainwright by prominent architect Gene Mackey. Mackey spoke to a packed house inside the Cemetery’s Hotchkiss Chapel, and then we caravanned to the Wainwright Tomb for a look-see, followed by wine and cheese.
When the tomb came into sight, with both its inner and outer sets of doors flung open, a frisson of excitement passed through the group. To be allowed inside a place like this, where only stiffs and the very rare mourner are supposed to go, feels creepy, somber, forbidden, and irresistible.
The interior satisfied our curiosity—kind of. There are a number of aesthetic features to focus on in the tomb. There are the heavy bank-vault style doors with their triple dead-bolt locks (pun unintended) visible from the back. There are the intricate mosaics on every surface, surely offering chills for the Sullivan acolyte who’s never seen his geometric designs rendered in tile. Looking up, you see the interior of the dome, where some very un-Sullivan-esque angels inspired by the work of Raphael float in an underwhelming sea of dun-colored mosaic.
Looking down may provide more satisfaction. That’s where the couple of the hour rests under the floor, engraved with quotations meant for the ages.
Her quote is a hopeful note about the afterlife: “Say not goodnight but in some brighter clime bid me good morning.”
His is the very soul of yearning: “O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.”
The mosaics are like all of Sullivan’s work—either his yen for hyper-detailed ornament floats your boat or it doesn’t. For my money, the exterior, with a sphere half-melted onto a cube, is more intriguing.
I don’t know what I expected from the inside of the tomb—a collection of titillations that boggled the senses? Some kind of funerary Six Flags? The answers to life’s cosmic riddles?
If a gravesite is like an epilogue, maybe this blog entry should have one, too, that offers some kind of closure. We know how the lives of the Wainwrights ended—hers shortened by an infection she developed in the scary, pre-antibiotic world; his, darkened by a sensational bribery scandal, 33 years after hers.
In Mackey’s speech, he described Sullivan’s ignominious end. For all his achievements, the famously prickly architect died destitute, alcoholic, and living alone in a hotel, his bills being paid by his most famous protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan, who checked out the same year as Wainwright, 1924, had an uninspired headstone in a Chicago cemetery, until fans of the “Father of Modernism” later funded a classy monument for him. His modest gravesite sits yards from other outsized mausoleums he himself designed as the final resting places of the wealthy of the Midwest.
Even the key to the tomb carries Sullivan's touch.
The inside of one of the tomb's triple-lock doors
Wainwright Tomb: threshold
