Creating a new future
Maple Grove CemeteryQueens, New York
It was originally two adjacent cemeteries, both with the Maple Grove name. One dates back to the 19th century, while the other, a memorial park type cemetery, opened in the early 1940s. Eventually, the two were joined together and now encompass some 55 acres. One component of the cemetery’s master plan developed by Blair Hines, ASLA, of Hines Wasser, Landscape Architects of Brookline, MA, (a firm that specializes in working with cemeteries) was a recommendation to provide alternatives to in-ground burial. Lakeview Memorial Garden and the Remembrance Garden are the two areas Mr. Hines designed. Lakeview includes a memorial wall with the names of the deceased carved in stone. The area in front of the wall is for in-ground burials and cremated remains. There are also areas on the memorial wall that serve as a columbarium. Notable features of the Memorial Garden are the 6” high walls that appear to divide the space into rooms. The names of loved ones can be carved on the low walls near where the ashes are buried. “If you were to look down on the Memorial Garden,” says Linda Mayo-Perez, the cemetery president, “you would see what looks like the outline of a chapel without walls.” She points out that the architect located old cemetery plans that included a chapel. “Although it was never built, the concept became our Memorial Garden,” she noted. The Remembrance Garden features a memorial wall of pink granite and offers in-ground burial sites, mausoleum crypts and columbarium niches. The niches are interwoven with solid stone blocks. The garden’s distinctive pink stone and design “creates a sense of permanence and structure,” notes the architect. Mr. Hines speaks highly of the Eickhof niche system. “It is very smart technology,” he says, “including both the hardware and the basic niche structure. The system is adaptable and efficient.”
The Memorial Garden is a beautiful place that holds people and where people can go, either individually or in a group, to find peace and consolation.
The Eickhof columbarium niches in this Memorial Garden wall are simply and elegantly engraved.
The distinctive pink granite walls of the Remembrance Garden convey a sense of permanence and structure. In the center is the Eickhof columbarium of interlocking stonework.
