Street Level....Atlantic Avenue

alloween is “like Christmas” for Roberta Halporn. It’s her busiest season. Halporn sells books like Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them, 1653-1800 and How to Guide Candlelight Vigils at the Center for Thanatology, which she founded in 1980. Thanatology, the study of death and dying, does not include the study of gravestones per se, but Halporn enjoys them, and so she has included that area of study in the center's bookstore.
“No one else in the whole city does what I do,” the 76-year-old Halporn says of her bookstore, research library and small publishing house, all located in the one-room bottom floor of a three-story building from 1840. Soon, however, the number of New York businesses dedicated to thanatology may dwindle from one to none. “The phone hardly rang in January,” Halporn states. “This place was dead.” Indeed.

Over the years Halporn has received grants from the Brooklyn Council of the Arts to help fund the center's exhibits, but money for those grants and the center’s revenue have dwindled Halporn says. She had to let her one clerk go in 2000. Now that she is the only one running the center, you have to make an appointment if you wish to visit. Although Halporn gets some free press (“There isn’t a paper in New York that hasn’t done a story on me,” she says), fewer and fewer people have utilized the center.

What is surprising to Halporn is that business got much worse after September 11. She was going to take out a notice in the paper offering help to widows of the tragedy, but decided not to. “I was very reluctant to take advantage of the situation. If I was an opportunist,” she says, “I would have.”

The center is housed in a very large rectangular room with double-height ceilings. Piles of books and cabinets containing “artifacts” are scattered around the room. There are a couple of chairs here and there, and in the back sits a desk with stacks of papers and books four-feet high surrounding a computer. A bookshelf, shaped like an upright Egyptian coffin, occupies the middle of the room.

Since the only windows are small panes above the door, little light comes into the room, even in middle of the day. Everything looks old and dusty. Glass-enclosed bookshelves, with extremely dirty glass, line a windowless wall; aging brown paper, whether in books or loose, clutters the room.

Generally, only researchers, historians, students and artists visit the center. The artists are usually interested in Halporn’s gravestone books and rubbings, on which she has become an expert. Once, a children’s class came to the Center on a field trip. Halporn taught them a class, which she entitled “30 Dirty Lies About Graveyards.”

David Meagher, a professor in the Department of Health and Nutrition Services at Brooklyn College and, one of the few thanatologists in the country, often sends students to the Center to do research. Brooklyn College offers a master’s program for people training to administer hospice care or grievance assistance, and there are also a number of doctoral students who work on death-related topics and use the center as a resource. Meagher has been to the center on numerous occasions and feels lucky to have something like it nearby. “Generally, you would have to have someone like Roberta who is interested in this, in order to have it,” he says. “You don’t normally find these kinds of places around town.”

Halporn’s interest in gravestones began separately from her interest in death. She had always been a hobbyist and was interested in folk art, and then discovered that she was also fascinated by the meaning and art behind gravestones. She learned to produce rubbings of the stones and the Center has many different examples of her work on hand.

Her prized rubbings include Edgar Allen Poe’s stone, which rests in Baltimore, Maryland, as well as of the stone of K.M. Bechet, a hero of the American Revolutionary War, according to Halporn, who lies in Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan. Since Trinity Church has changed management it no longer allows people to do rubbings of the stones. “They won’t listen,” says Halporn. “They should let someone in who knows what they’re doing and won’t hurt the stones. I’d fight it, but I’m getting too old for that stuff.”

Halporn says that her work now is very much related to a string of deaths of people in her own life. “I was a prime candidate for this,” she says. “I didn’t have to be taught many of the lessons in all of these books.” Halporn experienced exposure to death early and often in life. Her father died when she was five, and she went to live with her aunt and uncle. “I was going to live there for a few weeks while my mother grieved, but it ended up being years,” she says. Not long after her father died, her grandmother got sick and was “brought to die” in the house where she lived. By the time Halporn was 13, both her uncle and babysitter had died as well. “That was just too many losses for normal living,” she says. “I realized I had to take care of myself. Nobody could take care of me. You couldn’t depend on them. They died on you.”

Halporn’s childhood interest in thanatology flowered when she joined a small publishing house that was working on some books whose themes dealt with death. She was responsible for both proofreading and publicizing them and so had to become familiar with the material. The field was relatively new, but she became interested quickly. “It began slowly because no one would touch the subject at that time,” Halporn says. “But it grew over time as people’s attitudes changed.”

Halporn left the publishing house to begin, with her daughter's help, a book that catered to the funeral industry. She was living in Queens then, after having divorced her husband, but had grown up in Brooklyn and loved the area. When she decided to expand into a bookstore, she came back to her old neighborhood. She tried securing a loan in order to open the center, but was rejected by bank after bank. Finally, she used her inheritance to buy the building where the center is now.

Despite her appreciation for complex gravestones, Halporn plans on having a simple one to save money for her daughter. If expense was not a consideration, she knows exactly what she would want: a large colonial style stone with her entire genealogy and a quote from Shakespeare (she is not sure which one) all done in hand lettering. Instead, hers will bear just her name and the dates of her birth and death.

“I’d love a long, discursive stone,” Halporn says. “That’d be fun. But I don’t want my daughter to spend all of that money on a memorial for a dead person. If there’s anything left over, I want her to spend it on her life.”

Casual Atlantic Avenue passersby probably do not know that the Center is even there, but the other merchants in the community know about it because Halporn has been there so long. “She is one of my customers,” says Sam Hamad, who works at Jesse’s Market across the street from the Center. “She does something with tombstones. I don’t know what exactly, but she’s very nice.”