Manhattan’s Celebrity Cemetery

Père Lachaise, Hollywood Forever and . . . a tree planter on East 67th Street:

For the past six years, Transit Authority dispatcher Vinnie Lepani has been marking the passing of the famous and infamous with miniature headstones fashioned from tongue depressors in a smidgen of soil within a tree planter.

The makeshift cemetery has become an attraction in the upper East Side neighborhood. Tourists stop to take photos and neighborhood hospital workers occasionally add their favorite dearly departed to the display.

“We try to keep it as current as possible — depending on the weather,” Lepani said in a thick Brooklyn accent as he penciled movie star Glenn Ford’s name on a stick last week. “It makes conversation, and conversation is what makes me go.”

Lepani started the cemetery as a lark, with a trio of tombstones for three rock ‘n’ roll stars who died in a 1959 plane crash, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.

The next day he noticed that someone had added a fourth marker — he can’t remember the name — so he answered with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It grew from there, and now includes anyone Lepani considers boldface material.

Comedian Red Buttons, civil rights pioneer Coretta Scott King, talk-show host Mike Douglas, actor Pat Morita and musician Billy Preston are some of the recent additions.

“Tupac is in there. We don’t discriminate,” he said. “We had a big one for the King, Elvis Presley, but it’s gone. People steal them.”

. . .

Lepani has only one rule for the graveyard — anyone who wants to get in it better be famous.

Sometimes, the relatives of patients who died at Sloan-Kettering or New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell across the street ask to commemorate their loved ones. But unless they are marquee names, Lepani usually lets them down gently.