The Urban Cemetery
The urban cemetery is quite different than the rural one. Urban cemeteries are often squeezed by surrounding development whereas the rural cemetery is lost in the corn fields.
My maternal grandparents are interred in just such a cemetery. The county roads to reach the cemetery are gravel. The only structure seen from the cemetery is a long abandoned farm house.
In the St. Louis area many of our oldest cemeteries started out rural and saw development come toward them. A good many were started as a way of moving bodies from cemeteries closer in locations.
Looking at many of the cemeteries on a map it is clear many of them were located on the outer edge of the city limits or beyond the city.
This land, far away from the core, would have been cheaper than vacant land closer in. Having already moved early 19th Century cemeteries, new ones from the late 19th Century probably wanted to be far enough away to avoid being moved. The wealthy had country estates to the west of the city. Ladue was incorporated in 1936.  With land to the West taken by estates it follows that new cemeteries would be located along major farm routes out of the city, to the NW & SW.
Yesterday I visited one such cemetery, Gatewood Gardens Cemetery on Gravios near Hampton (map). Gatewood is in a cemetery row with St. Matthew & the Old St. Marcus cemeteries to the East, Saints Peter & Paul across Gravois and the New St. Marcus Cemetery to the West, just across the River Des Peres.
Gatewood, located on both sides of Gravois, has an interesting history:
Gatewood Gardens Cemetery began with a small congregation of Germans in 1832. They organized the German Evangelical Church and held services in a small schoolroom on Fourth Street, just south of Washington Avenue in 1834. Two years later a gentleman named George Wendelin Wall arrived in St. Louis and became the pastor of the now named German Independent Protestant Evangelical Church of The Holy Ghost. In four years Pastor Wall was able to raise enough money to purchase the First German Church on August 9, 1840. He remained the pastor for three years before a new pastor took over the congregation.
Frederick Picker began his ministry in October of 1843, and by the time he retired in January of 1855 he had accomplished many things. He averaged 420 baptisms and 225 weddings a year, and was instrumental in purchasing ground for a cemetery located on a 20-acre lot. The cemetery was located in the Kansas-Wyoming-Louisiana-Arsenal area in South St. Louis. It opened in 1845 and was called the Holy Ghost Evangelical and Reformed Cemetery. Many victims of the great cholera epidemic of 1849 were interred there and the last recorded burial in this cemetery was in 1901. The cemetery acquired the nickname, “Picker’s Cemetery,” and was commonly called such by the people of the congregation as well as the surrounding areas.
In 1862 the German Protestant Church bought a new cemetery, and called it the Independent Evangelical Protestant Cemetery. It is located at Gravios and Hampton and like the old German cemetery took the name of pastor Picker. IT became known as New Picker’s Cemetery. This cemetery truly became Picker’s new cemetery, when all the burials at the original cemetery were moved to this location by 1916.
An additional plot of land was purchased across the street (Gravios) and New Picker’s Cemetery became Old Picker’s, while the new plot became New Picker’s. The Cemetery remained in the hands of the congregation for many years before eventually being purchased by another church in 1978. This began the downward steps of the cemetery. In 1981 the cemetery would begins its trip through different individual ownership, and the cemetery’s next 15 years would be in continual decline. At this time the cemetery’s name was also changed to Memorial Gardens, and later it would be changed to its current name. When the City of St. Louis seized Gatewood Gardens Cemetery in 1996, the owners owed back taxes totaling more than $234,000. In the past six years there have been many improvements on the land and the records of the cemetery. (source)
Yes, the City of St. Louis took control of the cemetery in 1996.
The only new interrments allowed are in family plots. For the most part the city appears to be a good steward. But you have to wonder if this is a good use of precious tax dollars. Could a non-profit be formed to buy & maintain the cemetery? Clearly, a cemetery with no plots to sell has no profit potential.
FYI – I believe the old “Old Pickers” cemetary is on the site of Roosevelt High School, 3230 Hartford, in the Tower Grove East neighborhood.
This cemetary has zero profit potential but could easily be maintained by guys/girls in work release programs/qualified city jail folks, community service, etc. It probably takes at least three or four full time people to cut grass and trim and this could all be done by the jail birds.
It’s a tough call – if the city didn’t do basic maintenance (cut the grass), who would? It’s also a classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. If the city had “forgiven” the back taxes (and reduced the assessed value), could the previous owners have continued to maintain it? The reality is that it has no other use, thus little actual value. Now, it’s one of those “you broke it, you’ve bought it” situations. (And with the Alderman’s name on the sign, are discretionay ward funds actually the ones being used?)
Bigger picture, it raises two bigger urban design questions, long-term maintenance and the wisdom of dedicating land, essentially in perpetuity, to dead people. There are obviously differing opinions on what’s “right” or wanted, everything from cremation to burial to mausoleums to donating to science. Some require more real estate than others, and as long as you’re not creeped out living next to one, cemeteries do provide welcome chunks of green space in urban areas, much like golf courses and parks. And, as time passes, very few of us will really be remembered, so the need for headstones becomes increasingly irrelevent.
The real question then becomes maintenance and reuse, especially when the endowment runs out and the heirs are too removed chonologically or physically to care anymore. In today’s society (unlike some older ones), we seem very disinclined to even consider uprooting the dead. When does it shift from sacreligeous to practical to (even just) remove the headstones and make the area into a park? One where there are ballfields and picnic tables? 100 years? 200? I guess my only real concern with the current situation is that we’re (the city) essentially maintaining a private facility – if there were a long-term conversion plan, one that included more public access and public use, I’d probably be better with it.
I’ve been involved in cemetery preservation for several years. My heart cries at the disrespect and disregard that a neglected cemetery shows. If the city is taking good care of a cemetery, the (relatively) small amount of tax dollars is easily counterbalanced by the avoidance of the vandalism and crime a forsaken cemetery generates. Just look at what Old St. Marcus was before the city took it over. So overgrown the police couldn’t see 50 ft. inside it, the perfect hideout for the criminal element.
While in theory non-for profits taking over city owned cemeteries sounds like a great solution, I’ve found that people generally lack the interest or motivation to accomplish the hard work that maintaining a cemetery requires. The families of people buried in cemeteries no longer taking internments are most times long gone from the area. Just look at the heartbreaking sight of Washington Park Cemetery, even if it’s not in the city.
While I’m definitely against the wasteful use of tax payer dollars, I think we can find better places to look to start cutting than cemetery preservation and maintenance. As a true lover of cemeteries, a taphophile at heart, hearing reuse and cemetery in the same thought pains. You want a park, bring a blanket, have a picnic, spend time wandering, absorbing the history and enjoying the art that gravestones can be.
“Show me the manner in which a nation or community cares for it’s dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of it’s people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.”-William Gladstone (1809-1897), three-time Prime Minister of England
indeed Kristen, the Victorians often had picnics in cemeteries and why not?
I sort of miss your point as most of these were established prior to 1936 and I have no doubt speculators had plans for suburban expansion long in place, but the NW cemeteries were placed among the older golf courses, most long gone now due to UMSL, Lambert, I-70 and I-170, and they were more or less side by side. It was never a secret the affluent went directly West and a little South – just look at the prevailing winds. what’s the play by Ionesco – The Rhinoceros?
the golf courses and cemeteries were close enough to the CWE and Clayton for an easy drive and they were not exactly rural when developed as such. urban no, but sort of suburban for the time.
Just bulldoze the entire lot and put up another commuter parking lot to ease congestion, or another strip mall. These old cemetaries are stupid to maintain and show how silly we can be. The interred are DEAD folks! The relatives are more than likely dead as well, or if they are alive they are past remembering anyone in this cemetary.
No one will miss these bones, not even distant relatives.
I assure you sticker shock that yes, people do remember their family members. My grandparents are buried in this cemetary (passed away in 1986) and I still visit their graves. The peaceful should be left at peace, not bulldozed to make way for another strip mall when we already have plenty of them. Cemetaries are not only places to respect, they carry history with them. I am passionate about genealogy and when graveyards are uprooted it can be very hard to trace families and find records. Often times records are miskept, lost, etc. through all of the moving around.
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