In a city where celluloid creates an illusion of life eternal, where an enthusiasm for the future often uproots the past, it’s easy to forget that Los Angeles is like other places in one way: When its citizens are finished making history, they often end up under the ground like everybody else.
And one of the most fascinating places you’ll find them is the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, which is designated as one of L.A.’s historic-cultural monuments.
Sitting on 65 acres facing Washington Boulevard, bounded by Normandie Avenue to the west, Catalina Street to the east and Venice Boulevard to the north, Rosedale was opened when the city was very young, in 1884. It was a popular spot to be planted at the time because it boasted the first crematorium west of the Rocky Mountains, according to Laura Colbert, senior counselor at the cemetery.
Today Washington Boulevard, with its dozens of tawdry storefront evangelical churches, provides an eerie entree to Rosedale’s wrought-iron gateway. In its early years, however, the surrounding neighborhood known as Sugar Hill was home to L.A.’s affluent pioneer class.
Rosedale’s tombstones, crypts and mausoleums could serve as street signs in a more Gothic L.A.: Stocker, Glassell, Slauson, Bradbury, Benton and Shatto are prominent family names that can still be found throughout the modern city.
Fallen stars
The cemetery is also proof that movie “immortality” is as false and fleeting as silver-screen images. It holds the bones of Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American woman ever to win an Academy Award, for her role in “Gone with the Wind.” When the actress died in 1952, Rosedale was chosen as her final resting place because it was L.A.’s only multiracial burial site.
Many years later, Colbert explains, when Hollywood Forever Cemetery requested that her remains be moved into its own pantheon of film greats, the McDaniel family remembered that fact and refused to move her.
Beyond McDaniel, film-industry tenants are in short supply and of a decidedly “B” grade. There is Harry Moore, the Kingfish of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” fame, and Scotsman Alfred Eric Stuart, a veteran of numerous Charlie Chaplin projects.
Rather, it is “real-world” heroes who hold a special place amid the silent rows. Two sections are set aside for some 450 veterans of the Spanish-American War; their short, round-topped tombstones with state regimental information included catch the eye from afar. A monument made out of metal scrap culled from the ill-fated U.S.S. Maine, whose mysterious sinking set off the Spanish-American War, assures their place in L.A.’s memory.
Each year, the West Adams Heritage Association chooses five people buried at Rosedale and brings them back to life through costume dramatizations. The characters’ stories are recounted at their very gravesites. Last year’s theme was “Great Tragedies,” and among them were:
>Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, who as a 3-year-old survived the infamous journey from Springfield, Ill. to California in 1846 known as the Donner Party in fact, she was the daughter of the expedition’s leader.
>Walter Miller Clark, scion of a prominent family that founded Citizens National Bank and the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, who died aboard the Titanic after his wife Virginia managed to escape on one of the liner’s last lifeboats.
>Pauline de Wolffers, an only child whose father was a successful sculptor dubbed baron by Napoleon III. The family lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 and subsequently moved south. Pauline’s health was adversely affected by her exposure to smoke, dust and other elements unleashed by the cataclysm. The move to L.A. neither revived her health nor her family’s fortunes, and she died in September of the same year at the age of 23.
>Robert S. Hutchins, who survived the Maine’s sinking in Havana Harbor, which precipitated President McKinley’s war with Spain in 1898.
>Eric Dolphy, a jazz musician who played the flute, saxophone and clarinet in important sessions throughout the ’50s and ’60s, but died suddenly at the age of 38 from an undiagnosed case of diabetes. The legendary Charles Mingus called him “a saint.”
Gravestones and history
Other stories can be culled from the legends on the gravestones, however brief: Lawrence G. Clutterbuck, 1900-1907; In Loving Memory of Our Mother Mary Elizabeth Norton, 1888-1991; Hanna Krantz, 1843-1903, Native of Sweden.
If what lies beneath the ground contains important pieces of the city’s early history, what’s above the ground does, too.
“The monuments are wonderful works of art. The problem is that we don’t know who did them,” says Colbert. “Records from that time are terrible and those artisans have passed on.”
So has the industry that produced them. Crypts and mausoleums have gone the way of a trolley that ran along 16th Street (now Venice Boulevard) with a special car for depositing caskets at Rosedale. Colbert observes that the “death industry” has turned in recent years to flat gravestones, which lend themselves to cheaper upkeep, mainly because lawnmowers can roll right over them.
The cost of producing carved statues and Gothic structures is an important cause of their demise as well. Space has also become an issue.
“We’re booked,” says Colbert, adding that a new “Living Memories Mausoleum,” which will hold another 1,000 bodies, is under construction, while certain pathways through the cemetery might be closed to make more room for bodies.
The cemetery holds more than 60,000 bodies, and their identities are not found on any database, but on a system of index cards. The long slumber of many does not mean they are forgotten. “There seems to be a great surge of genealogical research,” Colbert says, “a great passion for people to discover their roots.”
