Running is how I know cemeteries best, which is not as surprising as it seems given the rural cemetery’s history as precursor to the public park in the United States. Anyone who has visited a rural or “garden” cemetery may feel its ambivalent kinship to both public-ness and park-ness. A casual stroll through bare, bleak city streets reveals a compellingly wrought gate, opening to a gently curving path. Abundant trees, shrubs, flowering plants, a green hillside! A view unlike any other in the flat, gray city.
It is easy to miss the gravestones for all the soft green and yellow nature. Certainly before knowing the history of rural cemeteries, I knew their beguiling accessibility. They have felt as much a part of the infrastructure of cities I have lived in as the roads and sidewalks and skylines. In dreary Cambridge, Massachusetts, I ran around the earliest rural cemetery in the country, Mount Auburn, built in 1831. In Brooklyn, I would as often run to Green-Wood Cemetery as to Prospect Park. Now, in Oakland, I run to Mountain View Cemetery.
Prior to the pandemic, I explored its grounds regularly. Before my wife and I got engaged, we meandered up the winding pebble-strewn paths, past the Monterey cypress, the cedar, past the secret outcrop of radiolarian chert, until we found a likely place to sit. The modest skyline of San Francisco and the rounded Headlands and the silver slip of Bay were before us, and we planned our future life together. So drummed into my sense of Oakland was Mountain View that its quintessential privateness did not even register with me until it abruptly closed to the public at the beginning of 2020 due to the pandemic—then was open only to the loved ones of those interred in the cemetery until 2022. A message posted to the Facebook page cited a range of public ills: unruly dogs, trespassing, graffiti, littering, and others.
The rural cemetery has always been equal parts pragmatic and romantic, and a privatized version of the public cemetery was at the core of its rise. A response to increasingly overcrowded, unsanitary, and largely communal city church graveyards, rural cemeteries arose in the 19th century. They are burial grounds built on the accessible outskirts of cities—meant to be serene and picturesque, but not so isolated or remote as to be unreachable for people living within the city. Unlike the later state and regional parks, rural cemeteries are often privately held, entrusted to a nonprofit or board of trustees to determine the extent to which the lands—which can be sprawling and costly to maintain—would be made open to the public.
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The Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris was an early template for these cemeteries. Designed according to Napoleon’s imperial decrees, Père-Lachaise initiated a new-to-the-time practice of selling permanent, private burial plots to individuals and families. Mountain View Cemetery was established in 1863 and designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, known, of course, for his public parks. The goal, for Olmsted and other designers, was to honor the dead and for the stewards of the cemetery to protect against the “carelessness, forgetfulness, and individual bad taste” of public opinion.
At Mountain View, Olmsted stressed that replicating the East Coast cemeteries in the “unfortunate” landscape and climate of the Bay Area was infeasible. Trees indigenous to areas with similar climates were preferable. The cypress of lower California were favored for their ability to grow in climates similar to the Bay Area’s, as well as for “seem[ing] more than any other tree to point toward heaven.”
I so love the sprawl, the winding roads, the grasping trees, the uncanny peace of these garden cemeteries. But I also visit with the uneasy sense that I—not having a loved one resting in their hills—am the noise, the crowd, the public city. And, too, I cannot help but think about the longer history of space and sacredness, so often conflated in the cramped or crowded city. Public space is more and more encroached upon, delimiting spaces of sanctuary: Oakland First Fridays are temporarily paused, People’s Park in Berkeley is walled off, parks are cleared of people’s homes, public housing continues to fall.
Cemeteries are heady spaces, ripe with meaning for how we think, mostly, about life. The rural cemetery movement reveals the weight the cemetery holds in our imagination. Read through the planning documents or opening remarks for these places, and you’ll find similar yearnings, achingly familiar to anyone who has lived in a big city. If we must live so closely alongside the precarities of modern life, we need the comfort of nature, that is, beauty, softness, space, the remembrance of joy. This is not a private yearning. It is a public one, in the sense that it is shared, equally, by all.
Mountain View partially reopened to the public in 2022. Now, three days a week, anyone may visit. I wish it were open every day. The limits reflect that other reality of Oakland: its shrinking public space, its less welcoming demeanor. Still, I am grateful to visit almost every week. Amid death, I am comforted too by the trespassers, the graffiti, the unleashed dogs. I am comforted by the city, its people who come to the cemetery to be transported, to remember that we are, together, its breathing life.
