99% Invisible - 258- The Modern Necropolis

Episode Date: May 10, 2017

In the town of Colma, California, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Located just ten miles south of San Francisco, Colma is filled with rolling green hills, manicured hedges, and 17 full size cemeteries (18 if … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. All right, coma. About 10 miles south of San Francisco, out toward the airport. There's a town called coma. I have never been to coma before, but it's cool you can take the train right here. That's producer Avery Trouffleman. Oh, all right, oh my God. Right beyond the train station, already these big rolling green hills

peppered with tombstones. 73% of the land in Colma is covered with graveyards. Oh, and they're just rows and rows of big gravestones that look like little houses. There are 17 full-size cemeteries together in one town, 18 if you include the pet cemetery. This is huge! It is a city of the dead, what's known as a necropolis.

We claim to be the only necropolis in the United States anyway, the only city that is primarily dedicated to cemeteries. This is Moreno Conner, president of the Colma Historical Association. It doesn't mean that there are a lot of cities that don't have cemeteries within their boundaries, but nothing of the concentration that we have here. And Colma truly looks like a sprawling city, a landscape of mausoleums and monuments and towers and tombstones that glint in the sun for as far as the eye can see. But it is eerily quiet. Here the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one.

We have 1600 living citizens, and we have about one and a half million residents who live underground, or in mausoleums. Maureen talks about her dead neighbors and her living neighbors with the same vocabulary, like when she referred to John Daly, the long deceased Dary magnate. John Daly, for whom Daly City is named, one of our neighbors. She's a lot of famous neighbors, like Joe DiMaggio, and Levi Strauss of Levi Jeans, and Tina Turner's dog is in the pet cemetery. They're all around, and Maureen's house is literally

sandwiched between two different cemeteries. I live across from the Italian cemetery in the front of my house and then the back of my backyard borders with the Japanese cemetery. And then I have two human neighbors on East and West. The official town motto of Koma is it's great to be alive in Koma.

It's great to be alive in coma. It's great to be alive in coma. Coma had many lives before it became the modern necropolis. Before it was even called coma. In the 1800s, it was rich farmland since it caught all the moisture off the bay. And most of the vegetables for San Francisco were grown there. At another point, it was known mostly for hog farming, and at another point, it was known mostly for hog farming, and at another point, it was known for cultivating flowers. Meanwhile, a few miles north in San Francisco proper, people were pouring in because of the gold rush.

The population was booming, and so was the death rate. Well, certainly there was an enormous amount of death at that time, and just because there were no antibiotics, people died of stuff that you wouldn't even think of dying of now. San Francisco's cemeteries started to fill up and starting in 1887 religious groups and organizations began, one by one, to buy plots of land south of the city to create new burial grounds, which eventually covered over two square miles. In 1924, the cemeteries got together

and they decided to incorporate. Those 2.2 square miles officially became a town, a cemetery town called Laundale, which in 1941 would be renamed Colma. And all of this was happening in the context of a much bigger change in American burial practices. For a long time, the dead used to be buried in little squares or church yards on dusty plots in the middle of town. Graves were all around, it was no big deal. Municipal barren grounds were right downtown and they were relatively small,

crowded places, with really nothing much by way of landscape design, they were just, you know, the land surrounding a church. This is Keith Egener, professor of architectural history at the University of Oregon. And in his book Cemetery's, he talks about how these tiny plain graveyards were hubs of activity. You might find a plumber or a brick layer or a carpenter, you know, seated at a cemetery waiting for someone to come along

and employ them. Farmers would graze their cows and cemeteries because many people believe that the grass grown in church yards or burial grounds was richer and made for sweeter milk, prostitutes, even, would sometimes be found in burial grounds. So these were open public spaces in towns and cities, many of which didn't have much by way of alternative open public spaces.

But by the 1820s and 30s, a couple things happened that changed how burials worked. Firstly, there's a series of outbreaks of disease, and cities were hit with waves of typhoid and cholera and yellow fever and it was just unsanitary to keep the deceased so close to the living. Also cities were growing and downtown real estate was becoming more valuable. Gradually in the United States, the lands of the living and the lands of the dead began to separate. Grave sites ended up far away from the city.

This model of a rural burial, separate from the city, took off in America in the 1830s when Mount Auburn Cemetery opened outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Well Mount Auburn was what was called and what is still called a rural cemetery. What that meant was that it wasn't smack dab in the center of a town. Also it was one of the first cemeteries to actually be called a cemetery, at all. Previously they'd been called, you know, barring grounds or burial grounds or church yards. Cemetery was a Greek word, meaning sleeping chamber. And just that word cemetery is so romantic and euphemistic.

Death had once been deeply enmeshed in everyday life. Americans had home funerals in their front parlors, and encountered modest tombstones daily in their town squares. Mount Auburn made burial something removed from normal existence. Rural cemeteries were stately. They looked like they were a world apart.

Mount Auburn was, and still is, beautiful. With emerald grassy hills and manicured hedges, there are statues of weeping angels in Egyptian obelisks, all connected with winding walking paths. So it was a much more artful landscape, modeled on the English garden tradition of picturesque landscapes, as opposed to just simply a flat piece of ground with a bunch of stones lined up within it. This new style marked the beginning of the rural cemetery movement in America, and it would go on to influence the design of public spaces more broadly. Because this was at a time when a lot of cities didn't have public parks or botanical gardens or museums.

These cemeteries then served as the model for some of our nation's first public parks, such as Central Park in New York, which followed that picturesque garden approach that was first seen in our cemeteries. It was later picked up for college campuses, suburban subdivisions, and many other applications. The cemeteries in coma were directly inspired by the Mount Auburn model as well. They were places to go to have picnics and amble around and get away from the smog and soot of neighboring San Francisco. If the city of the living was designed for speed and efficiency in business,

the city of the dead was instead understood as a kind of quiet, peaceful Arcadia, a kind of evocation of paradise or heaven on earth where one would take one's eternal reward. Oh, and about that eternity thing. That's very American. Americans have a rather distinct practice of holding to a burial in perpetuity. You don't find burial in perpetuity in that many other places. By burial in perpetuity, he means a plot of land that is yours forever and ever until the end of time Which is different than in say Argentina or France or Italy or any number of other countries around the world Where families of the deceased typically lease a burial plot it could be for five or ten years to a hundred years and

If the family doesn't maintain that lease then the remains are dug up or disinterred and what is left is often burned. The family is given the ashes and the plots are used for new burials. And this almost never happens in the United States. American cemeteries would rather double up on burials or do above ground burials than dig up remains. That's just taboo. And that's why it was so strange in the early 20th century when almost all of San Francisco's dead were dug up and evicted to make room for the living.

Which brings us back to the Graveyard of Colma. What happened in 1900 was that the Board of Supervisors of the County of San Francisco decided that they did not want any expansion of the cemeteries that were already in San Francisco. That's more you know Connor again of the Colma Historical Society. So the legislation was that there would be no new burials in San Francisco, and that went into effect in 1901. So no new burials. And that meant the existing cemeteries didn't have a reliable source of revenue, and so the cemeteries fell into disrepair and became these tiny wastelands for vagabonds and near-do wells and grave robbers, and also they were gross. So, in 1914, another ordinance kicked them out.

They passed legislation that said, not only no new burials, but these cemeteries just looked awful, they thought they were diseased, written. So the city said the bodies have to be disinterred and moved. From 1937 into the 1940s, most of the bodies from San Francisco were dug up and moved to coma, roughly 150,000 bodies in total. To move a body with the headstone cost the family $10. And if there was no money or no next of kin, the bodies were put into mass graves in coma. But like respectful ones.

Because when you think of mass grave, you often think of mass executions. And it was not that kind of process. It was a much gentler, respectful process. The deceased in the mass graves were blessed and memorialized and accounted for in records. And their headstones were reused as building material. Well, the mass grave headstones ended up a long ocean beach.

You'll see a lot of headstones out there. No way. Yes, they were used to keep from erosion. And if you find yourself in one of East Apark in the heart of San Francisco, look at the paved stones lining the trails and the street gutters. And you'll see that a lot of them are cemetery headstones. These headstones sometimes faded fragments of them. Sometimes completely intact are tucked

all over the city, hiding in plain sight. And they are the closest contact most San Franciscans have with cemeteries. There are only two graveyard left in the entire city. Death is a fact of life most urban dwellers don't see and don't think about. Whereas down in coma, Maureen confronts her mortality every time she looks out her window. I look out on the cemeteries and I think, you know, these people are resting in peace and sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all the things that I have to do, but the day that I wake up that I don't have anything to do, I'm probably going to be moving into

a cemetery. Most people aren't sandwiched between two cemeteries, and we don't really think about the question of what will happen to our bodies after we die. I ask the question, and very often people are like a little taken aback, either they haven't thought about it or they know I haven't made any plans. I certainly haven't made plans. And chances are you haven't either. I have no idea what will happen in my body after I die. And that's kind of unusual in the course of history. It was indeed the case that, yes, people largely knew where they were buried.

Professor Keith Egnar says that prior to the Civil War Americans assumed they'd end up in their family plots or town church yards and that their parents and children would be buried there too. That is no longer the case. We move from job to job, from town to town. We frequently encourage our children to go out and explore the world. We don't really know where we're going to be ending up. Which is why today, many people have opted not to be buried at all. Cremation has become increasingly popular into our own time, and this brought with it a number of new building types, crematoria, but also the public mausoleums

where you have a small box containing an urn with ashes. But with cremation, you don't need a connection to one place. Ashes don't have to stay displayed in a columbarium or a mausoleum. They can be scattered anywhere you've ever lived or wanted to live. If your family and friends live all over the world, they can each have a part of you. And there are these services that you can order where ashes can be compressed into a diamond

and worn around someone's neck or turned into a hand-blown glass paperweight. So there's a kind of break, I think, ongoing over the course of the last 100 years or more, in which people were perhaps much more rooted to the land, both in life and especially in death, by virtue of burial and knowing where they were going to be buried, then we are now. Simfrancisco's 19th century residents could never have guessed that they'd be evicted and relocated miles away from their hometown to a city of the dead.

Their headstone strewn about the parks and beaches of the city, of the living. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Truffman with Lany Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, and me, Roman Mars. Technical production and mixed-by-sharif usif with music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior editor, Kurt Colstead, is the digital director director and Terran Mazza is moving to the Bay Area. Special thanks this week to Ashley Bournemann and Marcy Russell at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. This episode was inspired in part by our friends at KUOW in Seattle. They have a new podcast called Terrestrial where each episode explores a personal question through the lens of climate change and the environment. Ashley Aherne, the host of the show, has a whole episode about what we should do with our bodies when we die in light of our changing landscape, and she features this architect, Katrina Spade.

My name is Katrina Spade, and I'm the founder and director of the Urban Death Project. Katrina's designed what she calls a recomposition center, a facility where it would be possible to compost multiple human bodies at a time. I realize this is pretty out there for a lot of people. I know the Catholic side of my family would probably freak, but listen to the way she envisions one of these centers. And remember, it doesn't exist yet. This is just how she imagines it. When you open the doors to the recomposition center, the first thing you see is this three-story, concrete form. It ends, you can see the top of it.

And wrapping around that core is a series of ramps. That's sort of a meander. To hear the rest of the concept of the Recomposition Center and some other ideas about the future of death, check out the full episode when it comes out next Tuesday That's May 16th, but for right now you can just go subscribe. Again, that show is called terrestrial. Check it out. We are a project of 9.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and have a nice subreddit too. But we release at least two articles about design and architecture that are just like the episodes, but you know, for reading on our website at 99pi.org. Radio to PO. From PRX.