Longtime city official finds new challenge in cemetery

Exactly one week before his 62d birthday, Alexander "Pete" Hoskins is taking a tour of Laurel Hill Cemetery. It's his second in the last two days, and he's paying close attention.

"Oh, look, there's Frank Furness," he says, stopping at the grave of the renowned Victorian architect to read the epitaph. "I didn't know he was captain of a cavalry."

Taking a moment at one point to admire the view from the top of a hill overlooking Kelly Drive and Fairmount Park, he smiles. "This," he says, "is my new home."

Don't interpret that literally. His interest in the cemetery is purely professional.

Next Tuesday, he will become president and chief executive officer of the West Laurel Hill/Laurel Hill Cemeteries and Bringhurst/Turner Funeral Homes.

Hoskins' tour takes him past the final resting places of Civil War heroes, Philadelphia socialites, mayors, scientists, philanthropists, poets, philosophers, financiers, and a few scoundrels.

He takes stock of the towering, thick-shouldered trees that have kept indefatigable watch over the sacred bones here for centuries.

He inspects gravestones, their bases exposed like teeth with receding gums, and wonders aloud why someone hasn't taken better care of them.

If his career move seems like a premature denouement for a man who is still ambitious after 35 years as the boss of major civic enterprises, well, it seemed that way to him, too, when he got the offer last month.

The annual budget for both cemeteries is $6 million. Their staffs number 40.

The management challenge seemed modest compared with those of his previous jobs: CEO of the Philadelphia Zoo, where he raised more than $100 million for projects; executive director of the 8,700-acre Fairmount Park system; and city streets commissioner, where he handled the staggering expenses and administrative migraines related to trash collection and road repair.

"I'll be honest," Hoskins says of the cemetery position. "At first, I didn't see enough challenge there. It seemed small."

Never one to cut and run, he says, he was loath to consider leaving his job as senior vice president of financial development for the Philadelphia-area YMCA.

It was only out of courtesy (and perhaps a little curiosity), he says, that he agreed to meet with Laurel Hill's administration last month. By the end of the afternoon, he was sold.

"This has all the legs of a very fascinating job," he says. "It's connected to community and history and family, it's a service business dealing with sensitive cultural issues." And, he allows, "I realized I really do miss being the one running the operation."

Laurel Hill Cemetery, on 74 acres of wooded hills in East Falls, opened in 1836 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998. Its sister cemetery, West Laurel Hill, is on 200 acres across the Schuylkill in Bala Cynwyd.

Hoskins is getting a cram course on how the sites evolved, the landscaping and architecture, the roster of famous Philadelphians buried there, and all sorts of other facts and figures.

He's escorted on this trip by an unlikely pair - the shy, very proper Gwendolyn Kaminski, the cemetery's 31-year-old director of development, and the loquacious grounds superintendent, Bill Doran, who has been working here for 22 of his 52 years and happily delivers his encyclopedic knowledge in an Irish brogue as thick as Guinness.

They tell the new boss about an unsolved murder involving the daughter of a former groundskeeper. They reveal the annual cost of keeping a perpetual electric "flame" going in a mausoleum ($18). And they show Hoskins plots where the living have staked their claim.

"Seamus McCaffery? Really?" Hoskins asks as they walk over a grassy slope.

"His wife bought it for him as an anniversary present," Doran says of the judge.

"Did he like that?"

"Actually, he was really touched."

One of Hoskins' main goals will be to increase funding for the cemeteries, whose spectacular monuments and horticulture are expensive to maintain. But he says he also wants to let the city in on this gorgeous secret park that even he wasn't aware of until recently.

"People used to see cemeteries as parks," Kaminski says. "Now, they just see it as morbid."

"Parks," adds Hoskins, "do better when people come to them. We're going to be challenged to create a new image."

Even before Hoskins' formal arrival, the cemeteries are ramping up activities designed to draw in the public. Halloween scavenger hunts and flashlight tours. A paranormal exploration billed as "Dialogue of the Dead." Tours for arborists and genealogists.

"I'd like to encourage people to use it for jogging and riding bikes," says Hoskins.

"We're experimenting with that," says Doran.

On Oct. 18, for the first time, the cemeteries will hold a 5K run.

The registration fees will go to Laurel Hill and a nonprofit for the homeless, he says, but given the need to protect the historical site, the cemetery will be limiting the number of runners until the wear and tear on the grounds can be monitored.

"You should run in it," Doran tells Hoskins.

"Next year," he says with a rueful cluck. He will, however, be attending the Gravediggers' Ball. For the last four years, the cemetery's nonprofit fund-raising arm has held the event. This year, it will be held Oct. 2 at the Crystal Tea Room and will honor the late Phillies announcer Harry Kalas.

Oh, yes, Kalas, who died in April, is buried here. You can't miss his grave. It's marked by four royal blue seats lifted from Veterans Stadium, and a massive red Phillies "P" studded with five baseballs.

"That's temporary," Doran says. "It's going to be replaced with a seven-foot tall granite microphone."

"Well," says Hoskins, "the design is certainly out of character with the rest of the cemetery. But it will bring joy and a sense of celebration."