Saturday morning in Boyle Heights we'll summon forgotten Evergreen Cemetery lore

Gentle reader,

845 days have elapsed since our last in-person event, a Route 66 bus tour that included a stop to explore Fairmount Pioneer Cemetery in Glendora.

Here, our merry gang was encouraged to take all the grapefruit we could carry from the old grove at the crest of the hill, and we laughed through the harvest.

That good fruit would last for weeks, a tangible link to a beautiful day spent exploring local history in good company. Who could imagine it would be so long until we could gather again?

We’re probably more Covid careful than most people, but the possible side effects—brain fog, ferchrissake!—would make it impossible to do our constant, intense historic preservation work of monitoring demolition permits, scanning agendas, tracking CEQA appeals, making written and spoken public comment, advocating with the press and public and helping our many preservation pals with their campaigns.

We’d feel like the biggest heels if we weren’t up for fighting for a Los Angeles landmark that desperately needed a friend, and don’t like the thought of bringing folks together and finding out later that anyone got sick on our watch, either.

So we’re easing into in-person events starting this weekend, not on the bus because those are pretty close quarters. Our last bus tour featured a pioneer graveyard founded in 1876, and our first walking tour focuses on a much bigger one founded the very next year: Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

During these long, weird months, we’ve had the great privilege of consulting the cemetery’s unpublished archives, piecing together answers to mysteries like the locations of long term corpse storage and whatever happened to Crystal Lake, and growing to greatly admire the dedicated men (and one remarkable woman) who turned a wild plot of land in the boondocks into a beautifully landscaped showplace, with a patented high-speed cremation oven, gardens of perpetual care financed by savvy real estate investment, and fascinating departed characters from every Los Angeles community, now numbering more than 300,000.

The prime mover behind this ambitious, non denominational cemetery was Victor Ponet, whose Morrison Hotel we recently discovered had been gutted sans permits by developers Relevant Group. Ponet was a cabinet maker and undertaker turned real estate millionaire, and a Catholic who wouldn’t even be buried in Evergreen. Yet we feel his presence everywhere, and long for a return to a time when the people who make great fortunes in Los Angeles feel compelled to give something this lasting back.

We’ve fallen in love with the cemetery and with the people resting there, and are eager to share them with you.

We hope you’ll join us for this tour, starting at 10:30am Saturday on a stroll through time, to bring the honored dead to life through pictures and stories, some heroic, some horrible, some strange and some sweet. And it’s our anniversary weekend, to boot!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available on demand, in-person walking tours, and a souvenir shop you can browse in. Or just share this link with other people who care.