Park Service Gives Grant’s Tomb Face-Lift

The celebrated corpse has lain here for exactly 100 years this month, residing inside the largest mausoleum in the United States.

But the body and national monument that houses it have had a devil of a time finding respect. Architecture critics have derided the mausoleum as “pompous.” Neighbors have made a habit of urinating on it. And casual visitors to New York have lost track of whose celebrated corpse it is.

While motoring along the Upper West Side of Manhattan a dozen years ago, a writer for the New Yorker explained to the actress Anouk Aimee that the neoclassical granite monstrosity high on a bluff above the Hudson River was Grant’s Tomb.

“Cary?” the alarmed actress asked.

Movie star Grant was not yet dead, but President Grant certainly was. And the moldering of his grave on the edge of Harlem was becoming a national disgrace.

Now, with a gala centennial planned for April 26, the National Park Service is giving Ulysses S. Grant’s resting place a face-lift. The agency has spent $1.8 million fixing the roof, painting the plaster and scrubbing away graffiti at Grant’s Tomb. It has also replaced hundreds of granite flagstones in the tomb’s plaza that had been crushed by marauding New York City garbage trucks.

The tomb--now spanking clean, except for some telltale water stains on the granite crypt floor near the twin sarcophagi--is all ready for a celebration.

It’s been a long time coming. For most of the last decade, the roof over the Civil War general’s head has leaked. When rains came, rust-colored water sluiced through the 150-foot domed rotunda and dribbled off various sculptures that symbolized aspects of the 18th president’s life. The biggest leaks came out of a seepage hole in the “Weeping Eagle.”

Disgust spread. The Illinois Legislature, noting that it was doing an “outstanding” job of minding Abraham Lincoln’s bones, demanded in 1994 that Grant be packed up and moved to a state, namely Illinois, that knew how to treat a dead president.

Grant’s descendants sued the U.S. Park Service, which maintains the tomb as a national monument, for neglect. They were furious that the tomb had become a hangout for drug users. The family also was irritated that each summer, thousands of Harlem residents picnicked at the tomb for jazz concerts.

Some members of the Grant family were deeply offended that the Park Service had allowed neighborhood residents to build a brilliantly colored bench along three sides of the sepulcher.

In 1995, Ulysses Grant Dietz, the general’s great-great grandson, told the federal government that unless it “accomplished something really significant” by April of this year, which marks the tomb’s centennial, the family would consider moving the bodies of Grant and his wife, Julia, to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

So it was that on the first Thursday night in April on 125th Street in Harlem, just a few blocks from Grant’s Tomb, federal officials felt compelled to attend a crowded neighborhood meeting and explain why the multicolored benches were bad.

“They are kind of like akin to what we call a weed,” Manhattan Park Service Supt. Joseph T. Avery told those gathered at the meeting.

Angry eyes squinted at him.

“When plants are in the wrong place, they become weeds,” he added.

But Avery surprised his seething audience: The United States government punted. He said that although the benches are inappropriate, the Park Service would not touch them again until after the centennial celebration and a citywide hearing.

Told that the benches would stay, Grant’s great-great grandson was resigned.

“The benches should never have been put there, but they are there,” Dietz said, adding that the Grant family “really has only one concern. That is, that the tomb be well kept and guarded 24 hours a day forever.”

Forever is a long time, Dietz acknowledged, especially in New York City.