Across America’s farmland and forests, her cities and their suburbs have been sprawling for centuries. Spreading out, shooting up organically, the concrete and the asphalt, and the homes of vinyl and sticks, spread, as if the sprawl were living.
Atlanta is perhaps the most alive of these urban organisms, and now, the living sprawl is oozing into the dead.
Kennesaw, Georgia, once its own city, is now a hybrid creature. It has a history and a brick-paved downtown. But it’s also a suburb of Atlanta. (What isn’t?) Developers are promising to revitalize the downtown and build new housing.
So, what to do with the Kennesaw City Cemetery just off of South Main Street?
Some developers imagined it would be a charming view from the residential housing planned for the area. These graveyard-as-a-view plans involved fencing in the cemetery.
Others had a more vibrant plan: Let the cemetery become part of the locals’ lives.
Officials and developers hope to turn the cemetery into a pleasant green space for walking and sitting. Locals have “asked for events such as stargazing and storytelling and other initiatives that delve into Kennesaw’s history,” the urbanist website Next City reported.
“The cemetery by location is going to be smack dab in the middle of a lot of redevelopment for downtown,” Darryl Simmons, a local zoning official, told Next City. “These folks could be walking around downtown, biking around downtown looking for things to do, and they’re going to see and discover the cemetery. So we saw this as a unique opportunity to position a cemetery for all of the new folks in addition to people who’ve lived there for many, many years.”
In bringing the dead into residents’ lives, Kennesaw would be following a trend both new and old. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn recently opened its gates to walkers, as opposed to merely mourners. Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta proper is covering a third of its costs with public events such as Halloween tours, a 5K run, and a concert of sorts called “Tunes From the Tombs.”
The flow of people to cemeteries is a throwback to the Victorian era, when churchyards became overcrowded with corpses and cities built the first cemeteries. These cemeteries became the earliest urban “green spaces,” according to American Forest magazine.
You could think of these large cemeteries on the edge of town as a sort of sprawl for the dead. And now, the dead neighborhoods are getting revitalized.
