Silent Cities San Francisco


Book Description

In 1914, desperate for land after the Gold Rush brought a population explosion to San Francisco, the city exiled its cemeteries, barring burials within city limits and relocating its existing graveyards to the tiny town of Colma, just south of Daly City, spawning America's only necropolis, where the dead outnumber the living 1000 to 1. But there's more to the story of the Bay Area's cemeteries than this expulsion. Silent Cities San Francisco reveals the complex cultural makeup of the Bay Area, where diversity and history collide, pitting the dead against the living in a race for space and memorialization.




San Francisco's Richmond District


Book Description

San Francisco is a patchwork of unique neighborhoods, and one of the most distinctive is the Richmond District. Stretching from the city's dense urban core outward to the rocky, rugged cliffs of Land's End, the Richmond contains schools, shops, churches, hospitals, and citizens from many different backgrounds and countries. San Francisco historian and tour guide Lorri Ungaretti, author of San Francisco's Sunset District, showcases here a stirring collection of vintage Richmond images, detailing this district's journey from windswept sand dunes to the modern and livable place we know today. Among the Richmond's long-gone sights are cemeteries, farms, racetracks, and improvised cottages built in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. The area remained mostly rural through the 1880s, when mining entrepreneur Adolph Sutro (who also developed Sutro Heights and Sutro Baths) put in a commuter rail line to connect San Francisco's central district with his entertainment destinations in the "Outside Lands" near Ocean Beach. The Richmond District's history includes large cemetery plots that are now covered with homes. In addition, the various roadhouses, racetracks, and amusement parks in the area made it what Ungaretti calls "the city's playground." They're gone now, but remain important parts of the Richmond's fascinating history.




199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die


Book Description

A hauntingly beautiful travel guide to the world's most visited cemeteries, told through spectacular photography andtheir unique histories and residents. More than 3.5 million tourists flock to Paris's Pè Lachaise cemetery each year.They are lured there, and to many cemeteries around the world, by a combination of natural beauty, ornate tombstones and crypts, notable residents, vivid history, and even wildlife. Many also visit Mount Koya cemetery in Japan, where 10,000 lanterns illuminate the forest setting, or graveside in Oaxaca, Mexico to witness Day of the Dead fiestas. Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery has gorgeous night tours of the Southern Gothic tombstones under moss-covered trees that is one of the most popular draws of the city. 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die features these unforgettable cemeteries, along with 196 more, seen in more than 300 photographs. In this bucket list of travel musts, author Loren Rhoads, who hosts the popular Cemetery Travel blog, details the history and features that make each destination unique. Throughout will be profiles of famous people buried there, striking memorials by noted artists, and unusual elements, such as the hand carved wood grave markers in the Merry Cemetery in Romania.




Silent Cities New York


Book Description

New Yorkers have always been pressed for space in life and in death. Central Park is synonymous with New York City. But without Green-Wood Cemetery, located in South Brooklyn, Central Park would have never existed. Founded in 1838, Green-Wood became the city’s most popular tourist attraction. The cemetery was so popular that urban planners challenged architects to come up with plans for a separate green-space for Manhattan. Hence, both Central Park, founded in 1857, and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in 1867, were born. Green-Wood presented not only a place to bury the dead but a meditative haven away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Other cemeteries followed in the park style, including Sleepy Hollow and Woodlawn. New York’s changing cultural landscape made Ferncliff Cemetery one of the most coveted places to spend eternity, with the rising popularity of Westchester County and suburban living. New Yorkers even secured a place for the four-legged members of the family with Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, now the largest and oldest pet cemetery in the United States. From the movers and shakers of New York society, to corrupt political bosses and mafiosi, Jazz legends, and a Brooklyn native son who returned to Green-Wood as one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, the stories of the permanent residents of these cemeteries are just as diverse and vibrant as the city itself. To travel through the cemeteries of New York is to travel through the hidden history of what some consider to be the greatest city in the world.










Till Death Do Us Part


Book Description

Contributions by Allan Amanik, Kelly B. Arehart, Sue Fawn Chung, Kami Fletcher, Rosina Hassoun, James S. Pula, Jeffrey E. Smith, and Martina Will de Chaparro Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed explores the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they buried kith and kin in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. At times, they did so for internal preference. At others, it was a function of external prejudice. Invisible and institutional borders built around and into ethnic cemeteries also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative centuries.







HIST SPOTS OLD EDN


Book Description

"Now in a one-volume revised edition, this encyclopedia of California historical information remains an ideally practical reference to the state."--From the dust-jacket front flap.