The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [50]
To these innovations cemeteries now add a further refinement: the sale of nice, cozy “companion spaces” for occupancy by husband and wife. The advantage to the promoters is that the companions will repose one above the other in a single grave space, dug “double depth,” to use the trade expression. One Los Angeles “lawn-type” cemetery gives this estimate of its land use:
Adult graves
1,815 per acre
Additional graves; made available by
reserving one-half of each acre for
double-depth interments
907
Babyland (three in the space
occupied by one adult)
120
Total number of graves
2,842 per acre
Another, also in Los Angeles, projects 3,177 “plantings” per acre on land used for ground burial.
It must not be thought that this sort of overcrowding is always the most profitable use of cemetery land. As in the conventional real estate transaction, it is more profitable to offer variety, something to suit every purse and give rein to every social aspiration, and cemetery land—like real estate for the living—is priced according to desirability. There are “view lots” and “garden locations” for those who aspire to be housed among the comfortably well-to-do; nice, roomy “memorial estates” for the really rich; crowded, plainer quarters for those accustomed to tract housing. Neighborhoods develop here too along lines of status and prestige, as well as along religious lines; lodges and clubs are represented by sections set aside for Masons, Lions, veterans’ organizations, and the like.
Prevailing prejudices in the land of the living were at one time mirrored in the land of the dead, and racial segregation as practiced on cemetery land paralleled that which prevailed aboveground. As court decisions forced changes aboveground, cemetery segregation fell back accordingly.
The next trend in cemetery development was upward expansion—the community mausoleum. Here indeed was a breakthrough in the space barrier. There may be limits to how deep one can conveniently dig to bury the dead, but when one is building for aboveground entombment, the sky is literally the limit, and ten thousand mausoleum spaces to an acre is a most realistic yield. Referred to disparagingly by cemeterians as “tenement mausoleums,” these are very In and are an enormously lucrative proposition. Structurally and functionally, they lend themselves ideally to the simplest form of block construction, for they consist merely of tier upon tier of cubicles made of reinforced concrete faced with a veneer of marble or granite. Crypt is stacked upon crypt—six or seven high—two deep, on either side of a visitors’ corridor. The most advantageous size for crypts, we are told, is 32 inches wide, 25 inches high, and 90 inches long.
One large mausoleum construction firm suggests putting a whole acre into crypts, offering the most alluring figures on property potential to be realized from the crypt-filled acre: potential gross sales, $4,308,000; net potential, $2,808,000.
All of the clever planning to extract the maximum use from each acre of land would avail little if the cemetery promoter then had to sit back and wait upon the haphazard whim of the Grim Reaper. With the death rate at its present level, he might have to wait a very long time indeed to begin to realize profit on his investment. This barrier has been brilliantly surmounted by the massive “pre-need” sales campaign, employing squads of telemarketers seeking an invitation to invade the privacy of your home. One of the most successful devices in the history of merchandising, pre-need selling is the key to the runaway growth of the modern cemetery business.
As pre-need sales continue to zoom, it cannot be long before every living American will own a grave, or at least have contracted to pay for one on the installment plan. Perhaps it is this prospect of a saturated market that spurs