Laurel Hill East

This guide to Laurel Hill East in Philadelphia starts with a slab of granite hidden for nearly a century beneath a wall of ivy on the bluff above Kelly Drive. It traces the cemetery back to the 1830s, when John Jay Smith, unable to find his own daughter's grave in an overcrowded churchyard, laid out a burial ground meant to feel like a garden, complete with river views that drew nearly thirty thousand picnicking visitors a year arriving by steamboat. That fashionable popularity eventually faded, and for decades vines and invasive brush crept over the forty-five-foot slope until the granite outcrop disappeared from view entirely.