Charlotte Canda’s Grave is an elaborate 19th-century funerary monument in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York City, and a notable location in the history of Type O Negative. The band posed in front of the monument for the photograph used on the back of their 1993 album Bloody Kisses, placing the Gothic Revival tomb directly within the visual identity of one of their most important records. Green-Wood Cemetery itself also appears in Type O Negative’s lyrics, referenced in both “Creepy Green Light” and “Dead Again”, giving the cemetery a recurring place in the band’s dark and distinctly Brooklyn imagery.
Bloody Kisses marked Type O Negative’s commercial breakthrough and established much of the gothic aesthetic that became closely associated with the band. Photographer John Wadsworth photographed Peter Steele, Kenny Hickey, Josh Silver and Sal Abruscato at several locations around Green-Wood Cemetery, with the rear album photograph showing the four members gathered around Charlotte Canda’s monument. Its white marble, Gothic arches and elaborate statuary provided an unusually fitting setting for the album’s mixture of romance, death, sexuality and black humour.
Charlotte Canda was born in New York on 3 February 1828 and died exactly seventeen years later, on her birthday in 1845. After celebrating with family and friends, she was travelling home in a horse-drawn carriage when the horses bolted and she was thrown from the vehicle. She suffered a fatal head injury and died in her father’s arms. Canda was initially buried at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan before being reinterred at Green-Wood Cemetery on 29 April 1848.
Her parents commissioned sculptors Robert E. Launitz and John Frazee to create the monument, incorporating ideas from sketches Charlotte herself had made for a memorial to her aunt, Clemence Canda, who had died the previous year. Constructed from white marble, the monument resembles an ornate Gothic shrine centred around a life-sized statue of Charlotte wearing the dress from her seventeenth birthday. The number seventeen is repeated throughout the design: the monument is approximately seventeen feet high and seventeen feet long, while seventeen carved roses surround the figure. Books, musical instruments, drawing materials and birds representing her pet parrots refer to her interests and life.
The monument became one of Green-Wood’s best-known graves during the 19th century and appeared frequently in guidebooks and stereoscopic photographs. Green-Wood itself opened in 1838 and became one of America’s most influential rural cemeteries, as well as a major destination for New Yorkers before the creation of Central Park and Prospect Park. Its landscaped grounds, mausoleums and elaborate Victorian monuments provide much of the atmosphere that later made it such an appropriate setting for Type O Negative.
The band’s connection with Green-Wood extended beyond the Bloody Kisses photographs. On “Creepy Green Light” from World Coming Down (1999), Peter Steele places the song’s supernatural graveyard scene at Greenwood, while “Dead Again” from the band’s final album in 2007 refers directly to being buried there. Together with the Bloody Kisses photography, these references make Green-Wood Cemetery one of the locations most closely connected with Type O Negative’s recurring themes of death, mourning and Gothic romance.
ADDRESS:
M245+7M, Brooklyn, NY 11218, USA
Back to New York.