May 5, 1950: “Grave Diggers in Walkout” read the headline under this photograph in the Sun-Telegraph. Workers at the Allegheny Cemetery sought higher wages, so 55 members of the Cemetery and Greenhouse Workers Local 2313 went on strike. Two of the workers, Dominic Madero, left, and Frank Bosar, picketed the Butler Street entrance. During the strike, bodies were kept in the cemetery’s receiving vault until graves could be dug.
This gateway to the cemetery is one of only three surviving structures built by John Chislett, one of the city’s most prominent architects. See another of his buildings, and how its surroundings have changed
over the decades, in Rebecca Droke’s “Then and Now” feature.
(Post-Gazette photo)
