"It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma!" - I agree with the town’s motto: the closest hardware super-store is there (only about 7 miles) and I drive there often for my household and gardening needs. And I did several unintended visits there when I missed the hwy#280 exit for the Guadalupe Canyon Pkwy. It’s a small and rather peaceful town, with a reason, argues Carol Pogash in her NY Times article (Dec. 9, 2006): "Colma, California, is a town of 2.2 sq. miles, most of it 6 feet deep".
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2006-12-10 |
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"We have 1,500 aboveground residents", Mayor Helen Fisicaro said, "and 1.5 million underground". 73 percent of Colma’s 2.2 square miles is zoned for cemeteries - or ‘memorial parks’, as the operators call them. There are 17 such parks, including those that cater to Italians, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Japanese and Serbs. And a large pet cemetery comes on the top of that.
Such is Colma, California, land of the dead for three-quarters of a century, and becoming more so all the time. Colma was founded as a necropolis by cemetery operators in 1924, to protect graveyards from capricious acts of government. The businesses of many of those operators had been disrupted a decade earlier when the city of San Francisco, 10 miles to the north, evicted all but a couple of the 26 cemeteries there, along with the thousands of bodies they held. The city’s politicians had argued that cemeteries spread disease, but the true reason for the eviction was the rising value of real estate, said San Francisco’s archivist emeritus, Gladys Hansen. For the first few decades, Colma’s residents were mainly gravediggers, flower growers and monument makers. But by the 1980s, other types of people and businesses were settling in next to the dead. Today the little city has many thriving businesses, including car dealerships, two Home Depots, shopping centers and a game room.
Still, the major local growth industry is human burial grounds. Cypress Lawn offers burial plots that cost as much as $20,000, or $250,000 for a family plot, said Ken Varner, its president. And what does a cemetery ultimately provide for that kind of money? "Memory management", Mr. Varner said. "Cemeteries", he said, "are really for the living".
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Krešimir J. Adamić
