Well, yesterday it was all about Punching In, today it's all about what's happening after that one final punch out.
I guess it's just not enough for the rich, nouveau and otherwise, to spend on personal submarines, $8K pocketbooks, $100 bottled water.
No, the rich aren't all superficial like that. They're not all into in the moment, show-off, instant here-on-earth gratification. Some of them are spending on goods that they may actually not get much pleasure out of at all.
No, they're going in for their own private mausolea. (Hey, four years of Latin does come in handy.) Or columbaria (which is what you call a mausoleum built for ashes, not moldering bodies).
Or so we learn from a recent Boston Globe article by Tania deLuzuriaga, A Place to Die For.
The subject of the article was one Thomas Hudson, Jr., a hedge fund manager who runs something called Pirate Capital - which is probably as close to truth in advertising as any hedge fun will ever get. (And, ahoy, maties, you can link to Pirate Capital but you can't get very far into the treasure chest without signing up as a customer. Not a plank I'm ready to walk.)
In any case, Thomas Hudson, Sr. died suddenly last year. While he was apparently a modest man - according to his son, he "wouldn't have spent a dollar on flowers."
But Thomas Hudson, Jr.
..."wanted to do something substantial," he said in a phone interview. "At the same time, I started thinking about my own mortality."
Something substantial turned out to be:
...the 400-square-foot Roman Doric structure he ordered constructed of 450,000 pounds of Vermont granite features 17-foot high cathedral ceilings, brass doors, and a stained glass depiction of The Last Supper. Flanked by hand-carved stone lions and set amid shrubbery, it is the biggest, most ornate memorial in sight.
Something substantial, it is estimated, costs around $1m. Maxed out, it will provide for permanent housing for 200 persons. Or ex-persons.
Mausoleums and ostentatious memorials are, of course, nothing new. Older cities in the Northeast all have cemeteries that are beautiful, park like, and full of nifty stone houses where nobody's home. In Boston, we have Forest Hills and Mt. Auburn. Forest Hills is the final resting place of e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton, Eugene O'Neil, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucy Stone, among others. Mt. Auburn hosts and boasts Mary Baker Eddy, Edwin Booth, McGeorge Bundy, Felix Frankfurter, Edwin Land, Buckminster Fuller, Curt Gowdy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Amy Lowell, and dozens of other luminaries.
Not all of these folks have big-time mausolea, but some do. And most of the mausolea were built then. This is now.
And, according to the Globe article, there's been a recent upsurge in splashy housing for remains and cremains. (And, let's face it, it is certainly more seemly to have your ashes in a nice, solid granite structure than, say, scattered around the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.)
Of course, since it is now, not then, there's a McMansion-esque aspect to the latest in mausolea. At least in the case of the Hudson memorial building, which is said to "dwarf" the other, more modest addresses in that cemetery.
But Hudson, apparently, likes to live, or after-live, large.
"I did it first out of respect for my dad," he said. "And second, out of fear of where I might go."
Well, Tom, I think we all have fear about where we might go, but I don't think building a 400 square foot mausoleum is going to answer that question.
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