The resting place of the sixth and seventh Lubavitcher Rebbes in Montefiore Cemetery, Queens, reached through a house on Francis Lewis Boulevard that has been a visitors center, open day and night, since 1995. Visitors write their notes at the tables, walk the covered path between the headstones, light candles on the shelves of the antechamber and stand at the stone enclosure open to the sky. The New Yorkers hang only in the house and along the covered walk; the enclosure is left as it is.
The Ohel stands in Montefiore Cemetery in Cambria Heights, Queens, at 226-20 Francis Lewis Boulevard near 121st Avenue. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn was buried in the cemetery in 1950 and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson beside him in 1994. The graves are enclosed by four walls with an open roof, avoiding the problem of tumas meis for kohanim, and a low wall keeps them at least 320 millimetres away; visitors light candles on shelves in the antechamber. In 1995 Lubavitcher Hasidim bought a house on Francis Lewis Boulevard and made it a visitors center open twenty four hours a day. Notes, kvitlach, arrive by hand, by fax (more than 700 a day) and by e-mail (about 400 a day); they are printed, torn and placed on the graves. About 50,000 people come on Gimmel Tammuz. Montefiore Cemetery was founded in 1908 as the Springfield L. I. Cemetery Society and holds more than 150,000 burials.
Source · Ohel (Chabad), Wikipedia ↗
The visitors center in a two storey house on Francis Lewis Boulevard with its library and writing tables, the glass doors at the back, the covered walk through Montefiore Cemetery, rows of granite headstones behind an iron fence, the antechamber with its shelves of candles, the stone enclosure with its open roof, and traffic on the boulevard. Mood: a quiet afternoon, candles lit. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.