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Canda Monument Green-Wood Cemetery Brooklyn, New York If this monument looks like it’s not quite finished or is perhaps a little, dare we say, unprofessional, it’s because it was designed by a teenage girl and not a trained architect or designer. When she was sixteen years old, Charlotte Canda (1828-1845), whose French parents ran a finishing school in New York City, sketched a design for a memorial for her aunt. Little did young Charlotte know that she was actually sketching a draft of a monument for herself. It was a dark and stormy February night (it really was, and a snow storm to boot), and Charlotte was all aglow from her combination seventeenth birthday party and coming out party. Charlotte and her father gave one of her friend’s a carriage ride home, but as Charlotte’s father was escorting her friend to the door, the horses, perhaps afraid of the storm, bolted and ran. Alas, the carriage door had been left ajar and Charlotte was thrown from the carriage, hit her head on the curb and died soon thereafter. Charlotte’s grieving parents asked sculptor Robert Launitz to use the design Charlotte had conceived for her aunt’s grave and adapt it as a suitable memorial to their daughter. The result of the Canda/Launitz collaboration has the look of a Gothic Revival wedding cake. Over a century of exposure to the elements makes the ornaments on the marble monument appear to be melting. In the center of the monument and housed in a structure reminiscent of a “grotto” or “aedicula”, Launitz carved a statue of Charlotte in the party dress she wore that fateful night. There are seventeen roses circling her head and the seventeen motif is repeated in the monument both in the ornamentation and in the dimensions. To add a touch of Romeo and Juliet to the Canda saga, her despondent fiance, Charles Albert Jarrett (1819-1847) took his own life two years later. Charlotte had been buried on consecrated ground and because Charles had committed suicide he could not be buried with his bride to be. Charles lies just off to the right under a coat of arms.