I am very disappointed

I am helping my family deal with a crisis right now, so I am hours away from home with no idea how long I'll be here. So in one of my few spare moments in weeks I drove threw Oakwood Cemetery (Syracuse, NY) on my way back from running errands. This was one of my favorite places to go when I was little. The grounds was well manicured, and the cemetery association would raise money through cemetery tours to show all the artistic and historical things in the cemetery [an international landmark when talking about the Rural Cemetery Movement, I might add].

I was there when they sealed the ground floor of the Chapel in the mid 1990s. I was one of the last people to leave it before they started bricking it up. I watched them seal it up in fact. I have pictures I took with kodachrome 35mm from inside on that day. The chapel rested by what was the original entrance. Next to it a hundred years ago were two large extravagant glasshouses. Across from those is the cemetery office & groundskeeper residence. At one time it was lived in, and in the 90s it was still an occupied/semi used structure with electricity and furnishings. I know, because I was there.

i did not plan on walking around because it was 90 degrees out and so sunny that I kept having lens glare problems whenever I faced south-west [this was in the afternoon]. I did not want to get sunburned from the daystare so this was mostly a "drive threw and take a look" visit.

I hadn't been here since the first weekend of the famous "labor day storm" so I wasn't as familiar with the place as I used to be and couldn't immediately find everything I was looking for. When I found the chapel I was amazed. The area that was the original entrance to the cemetery; the place that was intended to be the most elaborate because it was where visitors [a hundred years ago] saw first & last, was looking like Mt Moriah in Philly! Dumped trash. Overfull tipped over trash cans. Broken glass everywhere. No attempt to keep the grass & plants from overgrowing. Back in the 90s the road here was very well maintained and was frequently used as a parking area. Now the pavement was looking like the ho chi minh trail and was barely wide enough for my car to get threw [a tiny volvo wagon]. The Chapel was as sad looking as it was back then, though it a bit worse from another decade of neglect & indifference [no maintenance to the boarded up building]. I got out briefly to get some better shots of the chapel when the Syracuse Police passed by in a cruiser. At least someone out there is trying to look after the place.

Abandoned In The Cemetery by ~sgath92 on deviantART

I then turned around to find the office building gutted & boarded up. All the windows were destroyed [I'm not talking broken glass panes here or there] and someone made a quick attempt to board it up to keep people out. Probably out of fear of the liability more than concern for the building's preservation. Now my car does ok off road so I decided to venture further. I don't recommend you take your prius further from this point.  I drove into the cemetery along the even-worse ruins of roads into where the hillside crypts & pyramid are. The first hillside crypt was almost invisible because of the overgrowth. I am sorry indeed that I lost the pictures of this mausoleum c1993-1995 when you could actually get a good look at it. The road quickly became more of a path after this, and there was another plastic trash can that had been sat there in the hopes that it would discourage people from littering. This one hadn't been knocked over or flipped. I could have continued further but my car hasn't been running right lately and I didn't want to try to pull myself out from an inaccessible location. When it is cooler I will go back, if I have the time, and continue on foot.