Why nobody's buried beneath this tombstone in the middle of Northern Liberties

CRADLE TO THE GRAVE: The back of a tombstone belonging to Edith Gelman, who died when she was less than 2 years old.
Neal Santos

At the corner of Orianna and Poplar streets, next to a bustling dog park and across from a shuttered deli, there’s a manicured little park ringed by an iron fence that’s never locked. A few feet from an elephant-shaped kid’s slide and the adjacent community garden is an incongruous sight: a baby’s tombstone. 

After nearly 90 years of being battered by the elements, the grave’s edges are rounded like a bar of soap that’s been handled by many people. Its engravings, though faint, are still visible: “Our baby Edith Gelman, born December 14, 1925, died February 17, 1927.” Hebrew is etched into the reverse side and a sculpture of a lamb, a symbol of innocence, sits on top. Pebbles line the grave’s crest as if, in the Jewish tradition, visitors have come to pay their respects.

Although the grave is unassuming, it raises an intriguing question: Could someone be buried in the middle of this tiny lot in Northern Liberties? It’s legal in Pennsylvania to inter a body on private property, but local ordinances can restrict this practice. In Philadelphia, for instance, it’s now illegal to hold a home burial. But in the 1920s, when a young immigrant family might not have had the money to buy a cemetery plot for their child, other measures may have been taken. It wasn’t uncommon for infants to be buried in the backyard, says David Morrison, a Lancaster-based elder law attorney. “When their mother dies they’re dug up from the farm or wherever they were temporarily and then they’re reinterred at the cemetery with their mother.” Had the Gelman family buried Edith, thinking the location would be temporary, and left her behind when faced with unforeseen circumstances?

After submitting a request for a copy of Edith’s death certificate (these records become publicly available 50 years after the death date), I scrolled through newspapers on microfilm at the library, but turned up no death notice or obituary. The census would not have recorded Edith, since she had been born after the 1920 one was conducted and died before the 1930 survey. Sorting through ancestry.com’s results for families with the last name ‘Gelman’ in Philadelphia, I found a married woman who, in 1930, said she had given birth to six children, even though only five, all of them close to Edith’s age, lived in her household. Suspecting that Edith could have been the missing one, I reconstructed this family’s history until the telltale death certificate reached me. I had it all wrong.

Edith had been born in Philadelphia to Charles and Ida Gelman, who were both Russian immigrants. They had been living at 3126 Westmont St. in Strawberry Mansion when Edith died of pyelitis, or a kidney infection. If antibiotics had existed at the time, they could have cured Edith, but it wasn’t until September 1928 — a little more than a year after Edith’s death — that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In the coroner’s brisk cursive, the certificate says the body was conveyed to Joseph Levine, a prominent Jewish funeral home still in business, and then buried at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Collingdale, Pa.

The morning after a rainstorm, I drove to the cemetery to see if Edith was, in fact, buried there. Mt. Lebanon is like a labyrinth: Its graves are so close together there’s barely any room to walk and navigational markers are difficult to decipher. I stopped at the groundskeeper’s office to ask where Edith’s grave was located, and he pulled out a thick book, flipping through aged records until he found her. He led the way with his truck, and I followed. We parked and walked to the grave, our feet sinking into the spongy ground, soaked from the previous night’s downpour.

On the edge of the cemetery, close to West Oak Lane Road, the graves were sparser. All of them belonged to babies, many of whom had died in the 1920s, and almost every tombstone was inscribed with a lamb. Some sunk into the earth, while others were askew, but Edith’s grave stood straight and glistened.

Compared to the others, it looked brand new. When I called the groundskeeper later, he said her grave had been replaced in 1976, which accounted for the fresh appearance. Nearly 50 years after her death, Edith had not been forgotten.

Edith’s parents immigrated separately to America in the early 1900s and married a few years after Charles arrived. The Gelmans, who had six children together, did not stay in one rented apartment for long, moving to a new address at least every 10 years. Over the decades, Charles worked as a shoe fitter, grocer and later as an “egg man,” putting in 60 hours a week at the store he owned in Pennsport, according to census records.

If Edith was buried in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery by a conscientious family and had never been disinterred, how did a second gravestone for her end up in that garden in Northern Liberties? Sally McCabe, who moved into that neighborhood in the 1980s, had the answer. 

Edith’s old tombstone had most likely been returned to the engraver when it was replaced and left there with the intention of being reused once it had been sanded down. When the engraver went out of business, people in the neighborhood found it among the grave heap.

“In the ’70s and ’80s, there were these gravestones all over and people used them as doorsteps and in construction,” she says. “The place where they were stored, in the back, was on Leithgow right at Bishop Neumann. And there were hundreds of gravestones of the most amazing size and shape and variety that you could believe. Everyone had one in their backyard and the smaller ones are the ones that made it the farthest and the bigger ones didn’t make it as far because people just rolled them or put them on handcarts and they weigh hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

“They were beautiful. Some of them were huge and in the shape of trees,” says McCabe. “We ended up with Bernard Yudelwitz in our yard. I finally figured out that his Hebrew name was wrong and so rather than redo the whole stone, they would grind the face off and start over. You might see three similar stones near each other that had the same names on them but different dates. It was like the engravers were drinking a lot.”

When McCabe and her husband sold their house 10 years ago, they had two gravestones in their backyard. They gave away one with just an M on it and left behind Bernard’s tombstone because it was too heavy to bring to East Oak Lane, where they now live.

“When people moved them they were a lot younger and had a lot less sense. It was like, ‘Let’s roll some gravestones,’” says McCabe.

And by rolling, McCabe means this: “You need a couple of metal bars. You just tip and slip, tip and slip, just like that. Everybody wanted a gravestone in their backyard.”

Edith’s tombstone was being rolled to a garden on Second Street, but McCabe says the movers quit before they reached their destination, leaving the grave in the lot where it remains today.

Before 1976, an apartment building with a bakery on the first level had been there, until it was abandoned. “It got knocked down during the Rizzo administration,” says McCabe. “The whole strip of buildings there, kids kept ponies in them on Leithgow and Poplar. There were always ponies and chariot races. And one day they just came in and tore down all the buildings.” 

After the demolition, the neighborhood cared for the no-man’s lot until eventually, in 2000, the Redevelopment Authority sold it to the Friends of Orianna Hill Park, a community group which remade part of it into a dog park.

“Every once in a while someone from another neighborhood would walk through and go to the deli that was across the street and they would go, ‘Why is there a gravestone there?’ and we’d say, ‘Oh, that’s where we bury the children,’ and then they would shake their heads and go away,” McCabe recalls mischievously.

Edith’s monument may be all that remains of an era of backyard tombstones. McCabe doubts Bernard is still on her old property, which has been dramatically renovated.

Janet Finegar, the board secretary of Northern Liberties Neighbors Association who helped create both Liberty Lands and Orianna Hill Park, echoed a similar sentiment. “I’ve always been sorry that I don’t have one of the tombstones — I’ll bet that all the ones that are around are either in people’s gardens or have moved away with their owners. Bummer,” she says. 

Finegar, who continues to work with Orianna Hill Park as the board’s secretary, is glad Edith’s tombstone hasn’t been touched. 

“I love the tombstone. I like big rocks in general, hence many of the ones at Liberty Lands,” Finegar says. “I think it’s funny and kind of pretty, and it’s hilarious that people think it’s a real grave.”