History Buried : Memorial Asked for L.A.’s 1st Cemetery, Now Blacktopped

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work--

I am the grass; I cover all. --Carl Sandburg

No grass grows over Campo Santo, Los Angeles’ first cemetery. It rests, instead, beneath a layer of asphalt covering a downtown parking lot on county property just behind the Old Plaza Church in El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Before Campo Santo (Holy Field in Spanish) was opened in 1822, Los Angeles’ early settlers had to bury their dead at the mission in San Gabriel, the only plot then consecrated by the Catholic Church. Between 1822 and 1844, however, 660 people were buried in the old campo.

Church records aren’t clear on the date the cemetery was converted to a parking lot, but Los Amigos del Pueblo, a historical preservation group, now wants it changed into a memorial park.

“What we have here must be preserved,” said John Bowles, retired president of Rexall Drugs who serves as president of Los Amigos, which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the customs and culture of early California. The 25-year-old volunteer group has helped finance restoration of several historic homes in the state park and underwrites tours and the annual blessing of the animals on Olvera Street.

On Thursday, Los Amigos proposed providing $150,000 in gifts and services if the state would build a memorial park on the cemetery site.

“Some of the first families of California may still be buried here,” Bowles said. His group proposed donating a rare Mexican fountain, as well as designs for the park by landscape architect James Cowan, and all the trees and shrubs.

Jean Bruce Poole, senior curator at the state park, called the proposal “most wonderful news indeed. I hope the county and the park’s developers will be as appreciative as we are.”

She added that plans for a large parking structure elsewhere in the park already are being developed, and those spaces would more than compensate for any lost at the cemetery site.

But the county is not a signatory to the General Plan, she said, and it may be several months before any action is taken on the memorial park or Los Amigos’ proposed gift.

Cemetery Occupants

“Practically everybody buried in the old cemetery would have been colonists from Mexico, their families and Indians,” said Ed Carpenter, a lecturer at the Huntington Library in San Marino and an authority on Los Angeles cemeteries.

The bodies in Campo Santo were transferred in 1844 to aptly named Eternity Street (now North Broadway) and reburied on a site near Cathedral High School and St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, he said. Those bodies were later exhumed and transferred once again to the New Calvary Cemetery on Whittier Boulevard in the City of Commerce.

Carpenter isn’t convinced that all the bodies were exhumed and transferred during any of the moves. “I expect that in many cases they just moved the markers and not the bodies,” he said.

Judge Augustin Olvera, for whom Olvera Street was named, was probably buried in Campo Santo, Carpenter said, adding that he wished Los Amigos “lots of luck with its proposal. It’s hard to get parking space away from the county.”