Springtime and Renewal

It’s springtime here in Northern California. Everything is blooming. Like many people in my community, I’ve been spending increasingly larger amounts of time outdoors. I’ve been doing a bit of gardening and taken a couple bicycle rides in a nearby park. I’ve also gone to a couple of cemeteries. The cemeteries are abloom with colorful flowers. Some of the first to push through the soil are daffodils and tulips. The newly budded flowers always remind me of the triumph of life.

What most people don’t realize is that cemeteries were our first widely accessible urban open space. Before the advent of what are known as Garden Cemeteries, the closest thing most municipalities had to parks were market squares near the center of town. Open space was definitely at a premium in the noisy, dirty, and smoke-choked cities. The Garden Cemeteries became our first public parks, offering an oasis of green and a respite from the gritty cities.

The first Garden Cemetery in the United States was Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. It was established in 1831 and was modeled after Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, which was established in 1804. Mount Auburn was soon followed by similar Garden Cemeteries in Philadelphia and Brooklyn. Many more would follow throughout the nineteenth century.

Soon, thousands of people were flocking to the newly-minted cemeteries. They became so popular that some cemeteries had to restrict visits to only plot owners, while others sometimes charged admission. Green-Wood cemetery, established in 1838 in Brooklyn, became so popular that people in Manhattan decided they wanted their own green space and Central Park was established in 1853. Central Park, of course, took a number of years to develop, and, meanwhile, Green-Wood’s popularity continued to surge, attracting over a half-million visitors a year to see its magnificent private mausoleums and manicured grounds. By 1860, it was second only to Niagara Falls in tourist visits.

Cemeteries, of course, continue to offer open space, whether they are postage-stamp-sized churchyards or vast memorial parks. Nowadays, many cemeteries have community mausoleums and other buildings that are surrounded by beds of flowers. Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland California has a community mausoleum that is the centerpiece of their annual Tulip Exhibition festivities occurring in early April. Local garden clubs, florists, and floral design classes from a local college participate in free events ranging from exhibitions to floral arrangement demonstrations in the chapel. Visitors who walk the grounds are treated to sweeping painterly landscapes consisting of thousands of tulips in a wide range of colors that frame the bucolic grounds and majestic mausoleums.  We are again reminded that, while cemeteries are places where we honor the dead, they are, ultimately, for the living to enjoy.
Text and photograph © Douglas Keister Visit Doug’s Author Page