In Chicago, the Other Graceland By Cliff Terry The Washington Post Sunday, May 16, 1999; Page E02

It is the only baseball monument in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, but it is not the most strange or beautiful grave marker there. Graceland, a lovely urban sanctuary founded in 1860, is the patrician resting place of a different kind of heavy hitter--Chicago business tycoons, politicians, socialites. Thanks to its eclectic architectural treasures that echo the city's much-admired buildings, it is one of the most visited cemeteries in the country. For travelers who have taken in the usual suspects of Chicago tourism--Sears Tower, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile--Graceland offers an unexpected off-stride alternative.

Among those buried here are boxing champion Jack Johnson; Allan Pinkerton, founder of the legendary detective agency; meatpacking mogul Philip Armour; Potter Palmer, of the luxurious Palmer House hotel; and architects Louis Sullivan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies van der Rohe's flat, simple granite marker, designed by his architect grandson, Dirk Lohan, is a tribute to the master's "less is more" philosophy.

"Graceland was planned as a pleasure park," says local cemetery expert Helen Sclair. "Its founders wanted people to feel this wasn't a Gothic land of horrors." Landscape architects were brought in to alter the terrain with hills that still entice, winding roads and an outstanding variety of plantings, creating a feeling of immense space greater than the site's 119 acres.

Many of the deceased had been chummy members of the posh Prairie Avenue neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. "I mean, you wouldn't want to be buried next to someone you never even had tea with," jokes Sclair, a retired teacher who conducts classes on local cemeteries at Chicago's Newberry Library.

Most of the high-profile sites are clustered around Lake Willowmere in the cemetery's high-rent district. These include:

* The Getty Tomb. Frank Lloyd Wright proclaimed this, a delicately ornamented cube of limestone, a gem of American architecture. Lumber merchant Henry Harrison Getty is buried in Louis Sullivan's strikingly beautiful monument, which, reads a Chicago Landmarks plaque, "marks the maturity of Sullivan's architectural style and the beginning of modern architecture in America." Getty's initials are shrewdly worked into a medallion in the windows.

* Marshall Field Memorial. With its statue of a sad-faced, seated female figure, "Memory," this work for the department store founder was designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Henry Bacon, and was a prototype for their Lincoln Memorial collaboration in Washington.

* George Pullman Monument. The coffin of the inventor of the sleeping car is sunk into a room-size concrete block overlaid with railroad ties. The reason? To protect his body from angry workers after the bitter 1894 strike against Pullman.

* Martin Ryerson Tomb. Sullivan's mausoleum for the lumber magnate was based on Egyptian burial monuments--the pyramid and the mastaba, a blocklike structure with a flat top and slanted sides.

* Daniel Burnham Memorial. The architect who created the blueprint for the city's lakefront lies in lovely, simple isolation on a wooded island in the lake.

Visitors might also check out two Lorado Taft sculptures: the chilling, grim "Eternal Silence," for the appropriately named hotel owner Dexter Graves, and "Crusader," the shield-bearing knight, for the grave of newspaper publisher Victor F. Lawson.

There is also at least one decidedly untypical Graceland gravestone. Hard by the cemetery's maintenance area, it belongs to Henry R. Schefe (1939-1979) and Carol L. Schefe (1939-). The self-proclaimed "Outlaws Chicago"--motorcycle folks, presumably--created themselves a flat, simple marker indicating their eternal names, Papa Snake and Mama Snake, and enhanced by an etching of a human skull.

Graceland is a 15-minute cab or bus ride from downtown Chicago. (RTA information: 312-836-7000). Visitors can take a self-guided walking tour with the help of a $7.50 guidebook sold at the entrance office (4001 N. Clark St., at Irving Park Road). The Chicago Architecture Foundation also will offer two-hour tours on Sundays (312-922-TOUR) for $5, starting Aug. 1.