Long before Los Angeles grew up around a vast grid of freeways and towering skylines, the city’s first major expansion eastward began with a cemetery. A long-travelled graveyard of wind-swept hills and endless tombs in Boyle Heights, Evergreen Memorial Park has roots stretching back to 1877. In an effort to relieve what had become an overpopulated, cluttered and unsanitary burial situation in the older, crowded pueblo, Evergreen Cemetery was conceived as a park-like place for the dead to rest; something orderly and spacious for the citizens of a young and forward-looking town.
At the time, Los Angeles’ earliest burial sites were on Fort Moore Hill, but they were no longer enough to handle the city’s growing need for orderly interment. The cemetery’s founders designed a large, privately operated, non-denominational resting place to be the city’s first and set the standard for what a 19th Century California burial ground should be. The Evergreen Memorial Park Company was incorporated in April of 1877, and the cemetery was officially dedicated two months later in August.
The cemetery was the brainchild of a group of entrepreneurs, Albert Judson, Victor Ponet, Fred Dohs, Irving Dunsmoor and Isaac W. Lord, and was emblematic of an expanding and entrepreneurial Los Angeles. In their minds, the newly platted suburb of Boyle Heights was the perfect location for a residential district high above the river. The new cemetery would not be an afterthought: tree-lined drives, manicured lawns and well laid out sections created a setting that combined dignity with civic pride. Although the founders funded the project, it was Mayor Frederick A. MacDougal who presided over Evergreen's formal dedication, at which Los Angeles formally welcomed a new kind of memorial architecture.
From its earliest days, Evergreen reflected the city’s complex social fabric. A nine-acre segment along the southwest corner became the city’s potter’s field, where the indigent and unknown were laid to rest. For decades, this section bore silent witness to the lives of those lost to poverty, disease, or anonymity. Eventually, the county turned to cremation as potter’s field interments filled the land, and in 1964 Evergreen reclaimed the space, adding soil and returning it to regular cemetery use. Nearly half a century later, in a solemn tribute, the remains of more than seventeen hundred unclaimed county cremations were finally buried there, restoring dignity to those long forgotten.
But Evergreen was never a cemetery exclusively for the anonymous. In fact, some of the region’s most powerful families found their final resting place here. Names on marble and granite plaques read like a who’s who of early Southern California: Hollenbeck, Van Nuys, Workman, Coulter, Bixby and Lankershim. These monuments pay tribute to the ranchers, land barons, bankers and entrepreneurs who helped chart the course of Los Angeles’ future. At the same time, Evergreen also became one of the city’s most important multicultural cemeteries. Japanese pioneers built the Garden of the Pines, a quiet memorial to first generation immigrants. Chinese American families raised traditional altars and shrines. African American community leaders, artists and veterans also found their final home here. In many ways, Evergreen is not just a cemetery. It is Los Angeles in miniature, layered with generations of arrival, struggle and identity.
Living visitors also staked their own claims over the following decades. Evergreen became the terminus for Memorial Day parades, beginning in 1897; veterans and civic organizations marched in processions under fluttering banners to the cemetery to pay their respects. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, as Boyle Heights became more built up and parkland more scarce, community groups redeveloped the cemetery's outer perimeter into a 1.4-mile jogging track. Opened in 2003 and subsequently upgraded, the jogging path has given Evergreen an additional, unexpected character as an urban green space where fitness and funerary rituals coexist.
While its filmography may be less well-known, Evergreen has been in more movies than most of the stars it now holds in its grounds. Directors and cinematographers have been drawn to its sweeping avenues, historical landmarks and evocative views for decades.
Evergreen’s statuary has provided iconic settings for horror classics, hard-boiled thrillers and television series that needed both beauty and gravitas. Generations of filmgoers feel like they know Evergreen well—even if they didn’t know it was a real place.
Evergreen is very much alive today. Evergreen Memorial Park & Crematory it still is, with over 300,000 burials on sixty-seven acres. Over the years it has faced times of neglect, public criticism and controversy over its ownership, but it survives as one of Los Angeles’ most dynamic historic landscapes. Spend some time on its grounds and you will meet the city’s history at every step: the pioneers who made neighborhoods from chaparral, the immigrants who built communities from scratch, the working class families who made the Eastside what it is, and the countless others who have not yet had their stories told.
Built out of necessity, Evergreen Cemetery became the keeper of Los Angeles’ history. As much as it is a cemetery, it is a record of the city. Evergreen saw Los Angeles, and was part of the city seeing itself. Evergreen and Los Angeles grew up together, and the cemetery, in turn, was a part of Los Angeles’ growth. Its gates are open, its lawns are shaded by old growth, and its stories are etched in stone and dirt and quiet.
We invite readers to share their thoughts, memories, and personal connections to Evergreen Cemetery and its role in Los Angeles history in the comments below.
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