Most Area Cemeteries Not Near Capacity

Marilyn Monroe is still sleeping, but the noise near her crypt has been loud enough at times during the past year that it might seem to wake the dead.

The noise, routine for high-rise construction, has accompanied development by Held Properties of a $45-million, 15-story office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, directly adjacent to Pierce Brothers Cemetery, where the sexy blond actress was entombed after her death at age 36.

For 20 years after she died in 1962, her ex-husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, sent roses every Tuesday through Saturday to the cemetery. The roses were put in a vase next to Marilyn’s name on a wall that was, appropriately enough, behind Perpetual Savings.

Then the roses stopped coming. The Perpetual building was torn down in preparation for new construction. And the cemetery? Mourners might have felt like wearing hard hats as they entered it off Glendon Avenue, right next to steel girders that were being put in place, but the cemetery, and Marilyn, remain intact.

200 Graves Available

What’s more, despite its small size--just under 2.8 acres--the cemetery still has room for new interments.

“We have in the neighborhood of 200 graves available,” said Bill Pierce, cemetery manager, “and we also have niches and graves for cremated remains.”

This, despite the fact that the cemetery has 13,000 interments. It was dedicated in 1904.

Sure, some cemeteries have filled up. Some, like Forest Lawn in Glendale, are reaching their capacities. Some, like the 144-acre veterans cemetery in Westwood, known officially as the Los Angeles National Cemetery, are now taking only cremated remains, because there is no longer enough room, with more than 77,000 interments, for traditional casket burials.

In general, though, there appears to be little if any concern about running out of cemetery space, even in highly populated areas, in the immediate future.

About 90% of the space has been used at Forest Lawn, Glendale, but Forest Lawn has five other locations in the Los Angeles area with plenty of room, a spokesman said.

There are 109 national cemeteries throughout the United States, and of those, only 50 have any traditional grave space left. Of those 50, only one is in California, although there are five national cemeteries in the state. Even so, Theresa Bush, director of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, said, “There is no shortage of land (for traditional burials) generally, and as land becomes available, new national cemeteries are created.” A new one is being considered right now in Merced County, she added.

Perhaps the industry is kidding itself, but nobody from the American Cemetery Assn. in Falls Church, Va., to such state organizations as the California Interment Assn., California Assn. of Public Cemeteries and California Cemetery Board voiced even the slightest worry about cemeteries in general becoming short of land.

Nor did they express concern about such alternatives as scattering cremated remains at sea or launching them into space, the latter an idea that is still waiting approval from the Florida comptroller. Another alternative called cryonics, the controversial idea of freezing bodies in the hope of later reviving them, received a setback when a company behind the 1970s movement became defunct and was ordered to pay nearly $1 million in damages to families whose loved ones’ remains thawed .

Pierce agreed that there is no widespread fear of running out of cemetery space in the next few years but warned, “Maybe it will be hard to find a place for graves 50 to 75 years from now, unless they change the law so a grave is leased for a number of years, say five, and then, if nobody is maintaining it, the body is removed and the bones are put in an urn or pulverized and put in the fields.

“That’s what happens now in parts of Mexico, South America and Europe.”

Mission Cemetery

Only the wealthy, who can afford to pay for many years of maintenance, can truly rest in peace there, he added.

Here, it’s a different matter, although some variations of the approaches Pierce described have been used in the United States.

The tiny old cemetery at the Santa Barbara Mission holds the remains of 4,000 Chumash Indians. Yet, there was still room last year for a burial in a crypt. How? The crypt was purchased years ago, “before need,” as they say, and the Indians’ bones were unearthed even earlier--as the cemetery began to fill up--and were stored together for awhile in a small building, then buried together in a pit.

In New Orleans, which is just a few feet higher than the swamps, vaults in a tomb are designed with a hole in the floor and a space below, like the ash pit of a stove. When another family member dies, remains of the predecessor are put into the pit to make room in the vault for the newcomer.

Nothing like that is being proposed in California, where Phyllis Thames of the state’s Cemetery Board says “there is definitely no danger of running out of land.”

20 Vacant Acres

She wasn’t just talking about the suburbs, either. The nearly full national cemetery in Westwood owns 20 vacant acres across Sepulveda Boulevard, facing Wilshire Boulevard.

The property could be used for burials, but it is prime commercial real estate, and veterans, their spouses and their dependent minor children pay nothing for graves in national cemeteries.

Ron Buss of Buss-Shelger Associates, real estate appraisers with offices in Los Angeles, said that the last couple of sales in the Westwood vicinity for Wilshire frontage amounted to about $325 a square foot. This might be an incentive for the national cemetery to sell its 20 acres or develop them into something other than burial space. Cemetery Director Bush said, “We haven’t developed the land for the cemetery at this point, but what it will be used for, we don’t know yet.”

The going rate for traditional casket burials at the Pierce Brothers Cemetery in Westwood is higher, on a square-foot basis, than the recent commercial sales, but this does not necessarily indicate that cemeteries are good real estate investments. (See accompanying story.)

Graves at the Westwood cemetery sell for $10,600 each, with endowment care. That amounts to about $385 a square foot. “And they’re not the best graves either,” Pierce conceded.

Trend to Cremation

Niches and small graves for cremated remains run about $500, he said, adding, “Most of our people tend to be cremated.”

It’s a trend that grew in California from 28.6% in 1980 to 35% in 1985, and--as Pierce pointed out, “some faiths don’t cremate, so if we removed those from the total, we’d have about 50% of the population opting for cremation.” In the nation, California ranks third in percentage of cremations, behind Nevada, with 40.62%, and Hawaii, with 43.03%.

Cremation is an alternative that is helping to conserve land, which--despite its reported abundance--is expensive in the cities, as the veterans’ property and Westwood burial prices show.

Other alternatives are high-rise mausoleums. The cemetery has no plans to do it yet, and it would be contingent on city zoning and approvals, but T. W. Gordon at the 86-year-old, 60-acre Hollywood Memorial Park remarked, “We could eventually go up six or 16 stories.”

High-Rise Mausoleum

A 10-story mausoleum was proposed in Genoa, Italy, last year, but so far, none has been built anywhere that tall.

A high-rise mausoleum might be complementary to adjacent structures if built at Pierce Brothers, Westwood Village, but so far, one is not being built there. A building plan is being analyzed, however, and Pierce expects it to be implemented in a year or so.

“We’ll do it in phases, maybe tearing out part of the road and building under as well as above ground,” he said. “It will be expensive, but it will work out.”

A high-rise mausoleum isn’t in these plans, either, but a $1.2-million project is well under way at the largest, single location cemetery in the country: the 2,600-acre Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier.

Since it opened in 1914, only 300 acres have been used, and another 300 are in a semi-developed state. So Sandy Durko, vice president of marketing, answered, “No, we have no concern about using up our land.”

Unlike many cemeteries, Rose Hills has no “double-depth” burials--one casket buried directly beneath another, but it has a wide range of alternatives otherwise. Consider the $1.2-million project, “The Gardens and Heritage Terrace,” due to be dedicated in June.

The 3.4-acre development will have 10 family areas, with five caskets in each, that will sell for $130,000 per area. It will have a 10-foot high, 200-foot long black-granite wall, bisected by a waterfall, where the names of loved ones, whether or not buried at Rose Hills, can be inscribed at $125 each.

It will have two-casket crypts above ground selling for $22,000 each ($3,000 less than it costs to establish a family cemetery, which also requires proper zoning, a use permit and formation of a corporation); four-casket vaults under the ground, selling for $35,000 each, and a grassy area for the scattering of cremated remains. That price: $25 for scattering, $125 for a memorial on the wall.

“It would cost $25 or more for burial at sea,” Durko noted, “and then you don’t have a place to go where you feel your loved one is.” This is a crucial reason why many people opt to bury cremated remains instead of scattering them in the ocean, he emphasized.

Included in the Rose Hills 10-year plan, which is reviewed every three months, is a 2,000-seat cathedral and private mausoleums designed however people want “as long as they don’t intrude on others’ rights,” Durko explained.

The price: $250,000 to $500,000 or even more, depending on what the buyers want. Yet, a simple, traditional-casket burial site is available for just a few hundred dollars.

They aim to please at Rose Hills and are working to accommodate ethnic and religious influences, some new to the area. Lawns are prepared for Eastern sects that require the plots to face in certain directions. A hibachi-type burner is allowed on the grave site during a Buddhist funeral so that when personal effects of the deceased are burned, the grass won’t be singed.

Rose Hills is talking to representatives of a group of temples about establishing a lawn as the first Jewish cemetery in the San Gabriel Valley. There are already lawns designated for Catholics, Masons, Muslims and veterans. “Veterans can purchase property here for under $300,” Durko said.

Actually, nobody purchases property at a cemetery. What is bought is the right to use the property. It works something like a resort time-share, except that the right is “in perpetuity,” supposedly forever.

That’s probably what the Indians thought who were burying their loved ones before the bones were dug up and put in a pit.

Or, of similar irreverence, consider Campo Santo, Los Angeles’ first cemetery, on county property behind the Old Plaza Church in El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Between 1822 and 1844, 660 early settlers were buried there. They’re still there, but they’re covered with asphalt. Campo Santo is a parking lot.