Celebrate Mother Earth Festival brings music, more to historic cemetery - NJ.com
Apr 28, 2019This year, the cemetery will not only be hosting a lineup of local bands as usual, but will also be offering a wide range of family friendly activities for young and old alike. Admission to the Celebrate Mother Earth Festival, like all of the events at the cemetery, helps pay for upkeep and restoration of the grounds and its historic gatehouse, since the cemetery receives no funding from any church or government group. “We had a tremendous fundraising season last year, with our biggest event of the year, The Ghost of Uncle Joe’s Halloween concert, a big success,” said Eileen Markenstein, the head of the cemetery’s trustees and its spokeswoman. “So we were set to cover all the operating costs for the next six or seven months. But then, lo and behold, the boiler blew in December, and we found out it would cost about $12,000 to replace it.”The cemetery’s gatehouse, which dates back to the mid-1800s, houses two veterans who take care of groundskeeping and repairs, so the boiler had to be replaced.“Thank God we had the money, although we normally would have earmarked those funds to handle our normal operating bills,” Markenstein said. “But we discovered that if we laid out just a little more, we could convert everything over to natural gas, which will greatly reduce our fuel bills in the future. So now for about a $14,000 investment, over the long haul our monthly bills for heating which will be much lower. So it turned into a good thing. "We’re excited, it’s another eco-friendly thing we’ve got going to talk about.”Still, that large chunk of cash has to be replaced in the cemetery’s operating fund, which brings us back to the Celebrate Mother Earth Festival, which will kick off a new year of fundraising. Two films will pay tribute to the Notre Dame Cathedral In the wake of the fire that destroyed the spire to Notre Dame's Cathedral, the Landmark Loew's Theatre will pay tribute as it screens two "Hunchback" films on April 27. “This is one of my favorite seasonal events,” Markenstein said, “because t...
