Whether you own a California ranch-style home or a Tudor mansion, chances are the real estate you’ll occupy the longest will be very small and very plain.
However it doesn’t have to be, as witnessed in the mausoleums, monuments and columbaria featured in “Going Out In Style: The Architecture of Eternity” by Douglas Keister (Facts On File, $29.95).
Yes, it’s a book about cemeteries that photographer-author Keister rightly considers “the most unspoiled resource in American architecture. If you want to see pristine examples of specific types of architecture, the cemetery is the place to go. It has them all on a human scale.”
Keister acknowledges never having given a thought to cemeteries until a few years ago when he was photographing “The Bungalow: America’s Arts and Crafts Home.”
Early for an appointment in Oakland, Calif., he and author Paul Duchscherer decided to drive through Mountain View Cemetery and along its “Millionaires Row,” named for the wealthy buried there.
“As we drove in, Paul, being an architectural historian and educator, started pointing out the architectural elements–Gothic Revival, Classic Revival, Art Deco, and he started pointing out funerary touches like an hourglass with wings for `time flies’ and extinguished torches,” Keister recalls.
“I became kind of obsessed,” he says of the journey that resulted in “Going Out In Style.”
With the help of his wife Sandy Schweitzer’s research, he identified significant cemeteries across the United States from the Bronx in New York to New Orleans’ famed tombs and the simple St. Joseph’s Church in Molokai, Hawaii.
He then visited and photographed more than two dozen cemeteries, including Mountain View in Oakland, Calif., and Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, Calif.
In his book he has chapters on private as well as public chapels, interiors of monuments with stained glass and angels used in memorials. There are modern contributions, including a replica of a living room sofa erected in 1989 by a grieving husband so he could sit by his wife’s tomb and a granite replica of a 240D Mercedes erected by the parents of a 16-year-old who had longed for one in life.
“The golden age of the mausoleum was roughly after the Civil War to the Depression,” Keister says. “After the Depression started and with our mobile society the idea of family burial places, whether they be mausoleums or family plots, kind of died out. In the ’50s with the idea of living the good life, cemeteries and death were just something not talked about, and then cremation became popular.”
Keister sees that changing.
“In the last few years there’s been a real resurgence in memorialization. There are a lot of factors involved, but part of it is Baby Boomers who want to be individuals. They’re commissioning interesting monuments and the private mausoleum business hasn’t been this good in decades. Martin Scorsese just had a mausoleum built and the Haas family (Levi Strauss heirs) is having a new mausoleum built.”
Even his own attitude has changed, says Keister. “I was like a lot of people in my generation–just shake and bake and scatter me. Although I tend to think cremation is a good idea, I have a real respect for mausoleums now.”
Just as the prices of real estate and custom home building have risen dramatically in recent years, so have memorials, says Keister:
“It would cost you from $2-to-5 million today. There was one done recently for a beer baron in Cypress Lawn, and rumor was it was $2-to-3 million. Inside there’s upholstered furniture and every week they put in fresh flowers.”
If paying for it is difficult, getting someone to design a lasting monument is easy, Keister says.
“Architects love to design them,” he says. “They’re basically pieces of sculpture, so they don’t have to worry about plumbing and electricity, things that confound architects and ruin their designs.”
