by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As two decades approached since its closure and abandonment, the Old Calvary Cemetery, located at the base of the Elysian Hills below today’s Dodger Stadium with much of the tract taken up by Cathedral High School, continued to deteriorate as well as be subject to desecration. In the Los Angeles Record of 26 August 1912, Hugh Bailie wrote the continue destruction wrought at the graveyard, established in 1844 in an article titled “BONES OF CITY FATHERS DESECRATED IN RUINS OF ABANDONED GRAVEYARD.”
The writer began by observing that “surrounded by the desolation of utter neglect, their monuments falling to ruin, their tombs desecrated, their chapels scrawled over with ribald writings, the bones of the founders of Los Angeles are crumbling to dust” due to years of neglect and Bailie continued,
The ancient cemetery is lonesome and forlorn. It seems like a bit of old, romantic California, tossed aside and forgotten while the traffic of a great city rushes by unheeding the relics of former days, the quaint Spanish inscriptions n the tombs, made in the old days before the white man, lured by the gold strike of ’49, came rushing over the mountains.
Another striking reference was to the roots of pepper trees growing in graves, so that they “must be entwined about all that remains of some of the dashing Mexican blades of nearly a century ago, who rode gaily through the dusty streets.” Morbidly, the author remarked that “their skulls are lying around in the tangled grass of that old graveyard, footballs for any child who happens to wander through the desolate wilderness of weather-beaten monuments.”
Further note was made of the “heavy silence” and the “bad reputation” of Old Calvary, including the remark that “not so long ago a man’s body was founding hanging to one of the gnarled limbs of the ancient tree that springs from one of the graves,” while another suicide was committed at the top of the hill above the burying ground. The leaning and sagging of tombstone shafts denoted “a weird, forlorn scene,” while the removal of remains meant that “some of the vaults . . . yawn open.”
Bailie also commented that,
Hoboes, wandering into the cemetery, and recalling tales of silver-mounted coffins and bodies being buried with gold and silver ornaments, have evidently tried to rob the dead. These ghouls may have been successful on one or two occasions. Near the rusted iron tomb of Don Pio Pico’s wife, in the wild grass, lies a skull. Nearby are other ghastly objects.
Bleaching in the sun, on an iron spike of the railing around a grave, grins another skull. Long splinters of black wood, rusted ornaments, lie here and there.
With regard to the Pico tomb, it was remarked that “one of the bodies has been removed” but “the other is still there, with an inscription stating that it is the remains of Maria Ignacia Alvarado de Pico, wife of Don Pio Pico.” Just under a decade later, the skeletons of the couple were reinterred at the Homestead in Walter P. Temple’s new mausoleum in El Campo Santo Cemetery, so the removal must have been for Don Pío’s brother, Andrés, for whom there is a gravestone, set in the ground, at the New Calvary in East Los Angeles.
Also mentioned was that “a brick vault, bearing the date of June 28, 1842 . . . contains the remains of Maria Jesus Lugo. She was the wife of a white man named Williams.” She was also the daughter of the prominent ranchero, Antonio María Lugo, owner of the Rancho San Antonio, southeast of Los Angeles, and who gave his family the ranchos Chino (this to María Jesús and her husband, Isaac Williams) and San Bernardino. The 1842 date is notable because one wonders if she was interred before the official consecration of Old Calvary—earlier in this post, it was stated the site was selected in 1839—or if the tomb was relocated from the original campo santo on the south side of the Plaza Church, where LA Plaza Cultura y Artes is now.
Bailie wrote of “a massive stone tomb almost concealed under the overhanging limbs of a gigantic pepper tree” and in which were reposed the remains of Francisca Dominguez de Yorba, who died on 12 September 1850 at age 21. The wife of José Raimundo Yorba of the well-known family from modern Orange County, her body was taken to the Yorba family cemetery, now in the middle of a townhouse complex in Yorba Linda, and the stone, with its inscription, was also transported from Old Calvary.
After recording that graves seemed to date from as early as 1840 and as late as 1894, two years before the cemetery’s closure, the writer noted that there were also many European Catholics from England, France, Ireland and Scotland, and the southern Latin nations as well as from other parts of the Americas. He added that the Briswalter Chapel was locked, “but vagabonds have found a means of entrance through a back window high over the altar, using a piece of grave railing as a ladder,” while also scrawling “ribald verses and quotations over the walls inside until it is hard to find a square foot of the stonework not decorated with a rhyme or drawing.”
The colorful account concluded with a musing of the graveyard’s future:
Some day perhaps all the bodies will be taken out of the old Los Angeles cemetery, the trees hewn down and little homes built on the once-hallowed ground. Already hens prowl through the acres searching for choice morsels, vagabond dogs munch their bones on the grass-grown mounds and the pioneer oil-derrick is beginning to encroach upon the borders of “God’s Acre.”
In its 11 December 1914 number, the Record published “GRAVEYARD GHOST MYSTIFIES MANY,” as it essayed the strange figure with white hair, “a ragged stubble of gray whisker,” and a pair of glasses with a cracked lens.” Any attempt to engage led to the inquirer being “rudely rebuffed” as the man “can make remarkable speed on his lean limbs, win their flappy old tweed pantaloons” barely able “to support the weight of his emaciated frame and its scanty covering.”
The hermit “has been seen in the abandoned Spanish graveyard” and when approached “the old man, stumbling over fallen headstones and sickening depressions in the sod . . . blended with the dim outlines of the tombs, and . . . was gone in the fading light.” One morning, the man was spotted “in the old Spanish field of death” with rumors that he slept in tombs, while some evenings singing was heard and a fire detected under the pepper trees.” It may have been the mysterious figure who propped up the railing to access the Briswalter Chapel, where “a rear room of the grim house was found in disorder.”
Notably, the man was also said to frequent the Evergreen, Hollywood and Rosedale cemeteries and reportedly was seen at the national soldiers’ home, now the Veterans Administration complex, at Sawtelle near today’s University of California, Los Angeles, though he was said to wander mostly at night. Witnesses asserted that they saw and heard him crying or howling, while there were questions like “is he a ghoul—a bodysnatcher?” It was generally acknowledged, however, that he was harmless and the article ended with his purported appearance at a funeral at the soldiers’ home, where he was observed weeping—perhaps he was a veteran of the Civil War of a half-century prior?
Shortly afterward, a remarkable reinvention was realized for the Briswalter Chapel as the diocese decided to repurpose it as the new St. Peter’s Church, the first edifice, a wood-frame one, was built on San Fernando Street, now North Spring Street, south of Alpine Street, in what became the new Chinatown. The Briswalter was remodeled, including a cross-surmounted arch at the top, and the new house of worship was completed by April 1915, with a dedication held on Independence Day, at which Bishop Thomas J. Conaty “spoke a few words of congratulations to the people of the parish,” who were mainly Italians.
Leaping ahead a decade, we find that, while the 1896 closure of Old Calvary included a provision that the Catholic Church had twenty-five years to ensure that all of those buried there were removed to the New Calvary or other burying grounds, this was not the case. W.C. Davis, in the 24 March 1925 edition of the Express informed readers that,
Located in the center of an industrial and residential district, near Elysian park, old Calvary has become more valuable to the living than to the dead, and the march of civilization is soon to overwhelm it. The city is moving to bring about its abandonment.
Today it is a veritable picture of desolation, where not only “decay’s effacing fingers,” but the fingers of the ghoul and the fire fiend have left livid scars.
Further ravages were recorded in terms of broken tombstones, invaded crypts by those “probably looking for jewelry on skeleton fingers,” and the effects of weather on wood headboards. The Reverend Louis B. Galli, who came to St. Peter’s from Watsonville in Monterey County and was pastor for two years, “with sorrow in his heart, has done what he could to keep things intact” and “had violated crypts sealed up; has straightened monuments and done what he could to repair the work of the despoiler.”
The article reprinted what were considered “interesting epitaphs” including that of Ireland native Dr. Richard S. Den, who lived in Santa Barbara and then Los Angeles for over a half-century from the early 1840s until his death in 1895 and was among the first physicians in California.
In its issue of 10 June, the Los Angeles Times reported that,
To permit the removal of the dead from Old Calvary Cemetery on North Broadway [the name change from Buena Vista Street was made in November 1909], the City Council yesterday adopted an ordinance which requires all bodies to be removed from the site before January 1, 1928.
It was added that no burials were conducted there in 26 years and that “sixteen years ago the Council by ordinance, had formally abandoned the site as a cemetery.” Recently, however, several thousand property owners signed a petition specifically requesting that “the disinterment of bodies be adopted.” Moreover, “in cases where the families of persons buried there do not remove the bodies, the association owning the cemetery will remove the bodies to the new Calvary Cemetery in Hollenbeck Heights,” this last being the short-lived new moniker for Boyle Heights, though the new graveyard was in county territory at East Los Angeles.
The following day’s Express included an article by Ruth McClintock offered no small serving of purple prose under the headline of “Fight Plan to banish Old Calvary Cemetery,” observing that “a delicate pall of soft gray fog rested” over it that morning and that, in days of yore, “myriads of little yellow canaries sang there in spring and red-winged blackbirds darted upward here and there from the froth of lacy green,” as doves, larks and quails added to the menagerie.
In the middle of the Roaring Twenties, however,
Today Calvary is a deserted spot in the midst of bedlam. Autos speeding by, street cars with clanging bells rushing along, engines puffing and trains switching in the tangle of countless tracks in the river bed which was once the sea of waving willows. Hammers are clanging in the iron foundry a stone’s throw away, and chattering Mexicans pass along the street and stop now and then to chalk ribald words on the high fence that guards from the street those who sleep within.
McClintock, moreover, decided that “the pepper trees are lifting a last gray-green protest against the smoke and dust that is choking off their life breath,” while low-hanging branches of eucalyptus trees and weeds were “ghostly sentinels doing their best to hide the desecration on every side, where all is bleak, dirty, irritating ugliness.”
The writer indulged in more fanciful descriptions, including how, that morning, the overcast “wiped away the ugliness and noise was mercifully stilled for the while” as shifting fog “showed dark arches, like mission aisles” and also acted as “a lowered curtain, then lifting to show a reflection of the tottering tombs, the crumbling crosses and the crypts whose shattered faces show dim caverns like toothless, grinning gums.”
After picturing a scene where sunlight broke through the haze and a bird chirped before activity awakened “and the treadmill of the day has begun,” McClintock finally got to the point before again yielding to her self-conscious sense of whimsy that,
A movement is on foot to do away with the old cemetery. The location is too valuable to be used as a resting place for those who lie here.
There is much heated discussion and cold reasoning about the question.
But what matters it to those who sleep?
If they dream at all, it is of the old sun-drenched pueblo, of the song of the canaries and of the red-winged blackbirds darting in and out of the waving sea of willows in the river bed below.
More matter-of-fact in its coverage, the Times of the 14th, told readers that “one of the city’s most romantic spots shortly is to give way to the march of progress” even as it was added that old Calvary’s dead included those “whose names are known to every school child who studies the intimate history of California and the West” and who “symbolize the romance and stirring life of the early days of the dons in the Southland.”
Concerning the mass petition, the paper recorded that those signing “held that the disused cemetery in the heart of one of the busiest industrial sections of the city constituted a menace to the health and welfare of the community,” though it was added that the burial ground “occupies territory that is very valuable and is considered necessary to the economic growth of the community,” with one conservative estimate of the value of the 12 acres was pegged at north of a half million dollars.
George A. Damon, “internationally known city planner” and recently vice-chair of the county planning commission, was quoted as opining, without acknowledging how the neglect was allowed to happen and then offering a proposal that was plainly impossible to implement, that,
The old Calvary has been an eyesore for over a decade on one of the main arteries of the city. Its stage of ruin has been a shame and a disgrace. It has been so neglected that only a scant 500 of its thousands of graves can be found or identified. It has none of the dignity or sad beauty of old-world cemeteries in crowded areas . . .
I believe that every cemetery in populated sections of Los Angeles should be closed and the bodies disinterred and removed to sections where they will remain forever undisturbed. This action should be taken while the relatives are living and before the city has further expansion.
We’ll close here and return tomorrow with the concluding fifth part of this post, so be sure to check in with us then!