Somewhere to die, Postscript: the past is ever with us
Little did he know that he would soon have named for him …
A highway
And an affordable housing property
my post a few days ago observed, some properties need to go somewhere to die; in Henry Hudson’s case, developer Evergreen Communities began tearing down buildings, and excavating to regrade the site (to deal among other things with the water problems), and they found — I’ll let Charlie Allen’s email tell it:
Did I tell you about the dead bodies that we have on the site? There are 12 of them and we are leaving them alone. There had been an entire graveyard on one edge of the site. It got moved in 1851. That means a notice was put in the paper - “We are moving the graveyard. Come get your friends and loved ones.”
- Not everyone got remembered, and the ones left behind are on our property.
We create cemeteries to remember and revere our forebears and relatives, so we want them near us, which means that when it comes to urban land, the living are always competing with the dead. As I put it in Deadsville, man:
In the same vein, every town or village has had its burial yard, perhaps next to the church, near the town green, or — here — just a bit south of the growing town:
Colma was founded as a necropolis by cemetery operators in 1924, to protect graveyards from capricious acts of government. The businesses of many of those operators had been disrupted a decade earlier when the city of San Francisco, 10 miles to the north, evicted all but a couple of the 26 cemeteries there, along with the thousands of bodies they held.
The living encroaching on the dead is a common pattern of expanding cities. Relocation of crypts and mortuaries has been a feature of
Native American burial
As time fades the departed’s memory, there always arise good reasons for moving the bones, both ostensible and ulterior:
The city’s politicians had argued that cemeteries spread disease, but the true reason for the eviction was the rising value of real estate, said San Francisco’s archivist emeritus, Gladys Hansen.
In purely economic terms, cemeteries are a low-use low-value way to deploy property. Our view of them has changed as humanity has civilized, life spans have lengthened, and death has become less familiar:
“Most Americans used to live near a graveyard in the 18th century,” said David C. Sloane, author of The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. “That changed in the 19th century, when big cemeteries were on the edge of the cities and became destinations,” the precursors to civic parks. By the 20th century, Dr. Sloane said, an aversion to dealing with death had made cemeteries places that people “went out of their way not to go to.”
Large European cities are strewn with catacombs, such as in Rome or Paris, which the Boss and I have toured. Originally a maze of limestone quarries, they were converted into a gigantic mortuary in the very late eighteenth century, as a health measure:
The use of the depleted quarries for the storage of bones was established in 1786 by the order of M. Thiroux de Crosne, Lieutenant General of Police, and by Charles Axel Guillaumot, Inspector General of Quarries. At the time, the Les Halles district in the middle of the city was suffering from disease, due to contamination caused by improper burials and mass graves in churchyard graveyards, especially the large Saints Innocents Cemetery. It was decided to remove the bones discreetly and place them in the abandoned quarries.
Remains from the
As I put it in Deadsville:
However much we wish to remember our forebears, eventually the prices will become too high, and the move will be to cremation.
“Cemeteries,” he said, “are really for the living.”
So are towns.
“Over-ture! Cur-tain lights! This is it! We’ll hit the heights!”
In relocating the bodies — which by this time were little more than skeletons or loose heaps of bone — the workers indulged in their sense of the macabre, piling them up in votive designs:
Many have plaques containing morbid homilies:
The detrritus from our extended habitation is that cities gradually raise their ground level, as we bury our dead, drop and burn and mulch our trash. For that matter, the first habitations, caves or caverns like the cliff dwellings at Les Eyzies:
The soil itself forms an archeological record in layers, just as prosaic Henry Hudson captures a time sequence of
In any city, for that matter on most properties, we stand literally upon the bones of those who walked the earth before (an idea H. G. Wells explored effectively in his Time Machine).
The machine stays motionless, but the place around it changes
Without succumbing to the macabre, we may sometimes imagine ourselves walking through their space,
Halloween, when the dead walk the earth?
as James Joyce put it at the conclusion of his haunting, enigmatic novella, The Dead:
Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over
Write a comment