The little greenery that remains is largely maintained by families of the recently buried who tend to the graves themselves. When they arrive, they are confronted with 69 acres of neglect. Today, Japanese Americans converge with Latino families paying their respects at family plots. A large section of the grounds is occupied by Japanese Americans who had spilled over from Little Tokyo and moved east to Boyle Heights. Jews who populated Boyle Heights in the early 20th century lie there alongside converted Baptist land barons Isaac Lankershim and Isaac Van Nuys, a potter’s field of anonymous Chinese laborers and a section of monuments to the circus performers of a bygone era.Īmong the cemetery’s notables is one of L.A.’s most colorful black political pioneers, janitor-turned-City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay. And while other cemeteries in the state struggle with the drought, the problems at Evergreen run deeper.įounded in the 1870s, Evergreen became a common ground where waves of diverse immigrants share a final resting place.
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Its slide from Eastside landmark to neighborhood blight is a tortured saga of broken sprinklers, hapless management, drought and a state agency that has threatened to decertify the cemetery but has limited power to rehabilitate it.Įvergreen’s plight is part of a national crisis of historic cemeteries that have too little space for burials to sustain a healthy cash flow. Once an emerald treasure of Boyle Heights, the expanse of grass and old-world headstones has deteriorated into a wasteland of dead trees, bare dirt and ankle-high shrubs. As her mother watched and her daughter frolicked the grounds in a pink Sunday dress, Mayan sprayed water on the sparse weeds sprouting around her grandmother’s grave and another beside it. Laura Mayan attached a crinkle hose to a nearby faucet and dragged it over to the dirt-covered plot at Evergreen Cemetery where her grandmother was buried three years ago.
![find a grave evergreen cemetery find a grave evergreen cemetery](https://live.staticflickr.com/3183/3108277173_067999b1ae_b.jpg)
LA Times – NovemBy Doug Smith and Ryan MenezesĪna Paz waters while her husband, Ryne Climaco, cuts the grass on and around the grave of a family member at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.