Sacred Spaces, Common Places: The Cemetery in the Contemporary American City

Abstract

When considering a topic for a tribute to Wilbur Zelinsky, I immediately thought of cemeteries. The first meeting of the Association of American Geographers I attended was in 1973, at which he presented his work on place-names, later published as Unearthly Delights (1976). His enthusiasm for cemeteries as objects of geographical study made an impression, and in a landscape seminar at Pennsylvania State University in 1975, I spoke on the topic. Now, I return to the subject with a look at the cemeteries of Portland, the largest city in Oregon--not their internal form but as urban land use and as places in cities. My perspective in this essay derives from recent news stories about the city's cemeteries. Cemeteries have historically been seen primarily as sacred spaces, and that aspect should not be forgotten; people are, after all, laid to rest in them. However, ordinary urban cemeteries are increasingly viewed as amenity landscapes that provide historic, scenic, and ecological values to the communities that surround them (Jackson 1967-1968; Howett 1977; El Nasser 1998). The population of the five Oregon counties in the Portland Metropolitan Area, in northwestern Oregon, grew by 27 percent in the 1990s, but suburban expansion has been constrained by an urban growth boundary (UGB). (1) Over the same decade the city of Portland's population grew by 21 percent, although a little more than half of that was through annexation (Edmonston, Pepos, and Stewart 2003). The recognition of cemeteries as protected open spaces in the urban landscape may be particularly felt in such a rapidly growing, but bounded, area. At the time of their establishment, old cemeteries were typically a fringe-belt land use in American cities. Established on what were, at the time, the outskirts of the built-up areas, many cemeteries are now surrounded by urban development and have become intimate parts of the urban fabric through annexations of outlying territory. Aside from small churchyard burial grounds and family plots, cemeteries were seldom planned as an urban land use. Unearthly Delights, Zelinsky wrote: In few of the many maps and drawings of nineteenth-century American cities that I have recently examined is the an integral part of the initial plan. When the did come into being in plan or in actuality, it was obviously an after-thought (1976,172). As William H. Whyte, writing about towns of the twentieth century, had noted earlier, In no town plan that I have seen is there space allotted to a cemetery (1968, 240). David Sloane pointed out more recently that new cemeteries are usually unwelcome in the neighborhoods of America (1991, 243). Several reasons for the outlying locations of cemeteries come to mind. the nineteenth century, municipal governments saw burial grounds as potential health hazards. addition, cemeteries, even those privately owned and operated for profit, were not--and are not--typically subject to property taxes, so they provide little municipal revenue. Cemetery founders sought outlying locations where large of land were available at a reasonable cost. Faced with the need to balance fringe locations with accessibility, the developers often located cemeteries near public transit lines--directly along routes of urban expansion (Pattison 1955; Rugg 2000). Gathering Places for America's Dead, Zelinsky noted that zones of high population density, and most particularly metropolitan areas, will acquire numerous cemeteries as a matter of course but that the metropolitan areas the price of inner city real estate has propelled most cemeteries into suburban tracts (1994, 35). Municipal reluctance to plan for and locate cemeteries within cities is not matched by a contemporary desire to remove existing burial grounds. many cities, including Portland, residential demand for close-in locations has led to redevelopment and infill construction. …

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