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They're dying to get in: City adds more burial space at Hyde Park cemetery
By adamg on Thu, 10/17/2013 - 3:11pm
The mayor's office today announced an expansion at the city-owned Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park: 1,600 new grave spaces and a new columbarium with 800 "niches" for people who prefer cremation.
The cemetery, opened in 1893, sits next to the Mother Brook and features a park-like landscape.
Among those buried there: James Monroe Trotter, the Army’s first African-American commissioned officer in the Civil War, Brigadier General Edward Beebe Carrington, a frontier fighter and historian of Washington’s military strategy, Hippolitus Fiske and Charles Jenney, two founders of Hyde Park, and John Joseph Enneking, the American impressionist painter who, as a Hyde Park parks commissioner, handled the transformation of the large estate of Henry Grew into what is now Stony Brook Reservation - through which Enneking Parkway runs.
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Comments
It's funny that someone
It's funny that someone finally got around to announcing this. There have been at least two burials in the new section over the past several weeks, maybe more. I have to say though, it was fascinating to see a modern cemetery get built. Did you know that each individual burial plot (not even the columbarium, but ordinary grave sites) has its own concrete vault? That's how they pack the graves so close together. Here's a picture of the vaults getting installed last August.
Why are we still taking up
Why are we still taking up land to use as long term storage for corpses? Once you're dead, you're gone. If people want to keep you around, hit the crematorium and shack up in an urn; then you get to sit pretty, high up on the mantle. Filling up fields by planting corpses like seeds is a shitty way to honor the dead and a ridiculous use of land. What's worse, cemeteries were primarily a church thing (when they could still afford the land), yet they believe the real person is the soul (which departs at death) so they're just saving the husk. It never really made any sense to begin with.
Cemeteries make for well
Cemeteries make for well-preserved greenspace that would otherwise be up for development.
Maybe so...
...but it's considered disrespectful to jog or otherwise use it in a manner that most other green-spaces would be used. It ends up with that "look but don't touch" museum-like quality. Still a big waste, in my opinion. Poltergeists be damned, I'd be fine with removing the tombstones and turning them all in to open parks.
Forest Hills Cemetery encourages active recreation
including jogging and bicycling. You can't ride a bike at Mount Auburn, but you can still run there.
Boston's earliest graveyards
Boston's earliest graveyards were not 'church things.' Roxbury's first burial ground is at Washington and Eustis street - no church nearby. And these were obsessively religious people.
Would "church affair" be
Would "church affair" be better? Perhaps "religious concern?" Cemeteries go further back than Roxbury. So cities started making non-denominational cemeteries to preserve religious tradition, since they were "obsessively religious," as you so helpfully pointed out. My point still stands.
fairview cemetary
my father, grandfather, and great grandfather are all over there. my great grand pappy was born in south boston in 1874. i also have a great great uncle who died in the spanish american war in the same plot.