8 MAY 23-29, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | time, since its residents tend to be, and be- cause the families footing the bill expect a fi nal resting place to be fi nal. But nowhere can ward off change completely, even if a cemetery can reasonably stave off new development within its hallowed borders — barring a literal Act of Congress, as in the case of Cheesman Park. First, the Burlington and Colorado Rail- road came for Riverside, cutting a line across its southeast corner in 1881. Then came in- dustry, drawn to the rail connection and the Platte River access that gave the cemetery its name: slaughterhouses, junkyards, smelters and the other industrial operations common to a city’s outskirts. These were not the tony residential developments Riverside’s found- ers anticipated — especially compared to the digs surrounding Fairmount Cemetery, which was organized in 1890 to give Denver resi- dents a more upscale place to spend eternity. “That spelled the demise for Riverside,” according to historian Student. “If the rich and wealthy didn’t want to be buried there, that took the money away. You know, that’s life. Life happened, and it didn’t happen well for Riverside.” The central paradox of a cemetery is that it commemorates the inevitability of the end while also requiring continuous growth. When the burials stop, the money stops — save for interest earned from perpetual-care endow- ments, which at Riverside doesn’t amount to much. “What a cemetery is selling are burial services and real estate,” says Chris Keller, the treasurer of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association and a Colorado-based cemetery consultant. Just as few people clamor to live next to a meatpacking plant, few people want to be dead next to one. By January 1900, Fairmount, very much the bourgeois cemetery on the rise, had acquired Riverside. The latter became the lesser, relegated to something of a potter’s fi eld, with “welfare cases” rising to about 25 percent of the cemetery’s interments, according to Student. Critics claim that Riverside’s story since its acquisition is a “tale of two cemeteries,” and that the Fairmount Cemetery Com- pany’s minders realized that Riverside was a poor investment and directed their time, money and care to the more profi table of the two burial grounds, leaving Riverside to wither. It is undeniable that since the 1920s, Fairmount has had more money coming in — and that money chases money. But Fairmount management hasn’t neces- sarily walked away from Riverside. In fact, according to cemetery expert Keller, the company has “spent a fair amount of its op- erational income to maintain and improve” the place. Without Fairmount’s ownership and its namesake cemetery’s comparative success and resources, there’s a good chance Riverside would probably be a lot worse off. As for the parched environs, it isn’t en- tirely that Fairmount was tired of footing the watering bill for paupers’ graves. Newspaper articles from as recently as 1970 call River- side “a green oasis in an industrial desert” and feature Fairmount Cemetery Company executives launching a $250,000 improve- ment campaign while pledging to continue to plant grass and water fl owers. History had other plans, though. A series of 1981 court judgments proclaimed that Riverside didn’t possess the water rights to the South Platte River that it had relied on since 1879. From 1981 on, Riverside negoti- ated a fl at, discounted rate from Denver Water; that agreement, purportedly me- morialized by only a handshake, fell apart under scrutiny in 2001 — and the cemetery couldn’t afford the new, contractual going rate. Watering operations ceased altogether in 2003, a particularly ironic development for the cemetery whose most impressive monument might just be the one honoring the founder of what would become Denver Water, James Archer (though he’s buried in green acres somewhere else). Much of Riverside’s tree canopy died off during a blight in the 1970s, and most of the rest disappeared with the turf when the taps turned off. “In the prairie, which is where Riverside is located, you can’t keep seventy acres of lush turf and non-native, water-hog trees growing without water,” Keller notes. Is Riverside dying a prolonged death by dehydration? Its appearance in 2024 is hardly comparable to that of Denver City Cem- etery, whose indisputable “death” 140 years prior gave rise to Riverside. Sure, some of Riverside’s monuments are shopworn, but they aren’t crumbled across the ground in chunks. Sure, very little looks manicured, and an especially angry mother goose might hiss visitors away from its nest in a thicket between gravestones, but there are clear, clean roads and paths from which you can safely explore history. Sure, trains blast by and sewage stench wafts in on the back of dust storms, but there’s no trash blowing about — and many gravesites, especially Soule’s, still feature fl owers left with love. In the spring, serene patches of wildfl owers leap forth, often rising much taller than the anthills. Robin Brilz, the director of the Fairmount Heritage Foundation — which works to “protect the heritage of Riverside and Fair- mount for future generations” by organiz- ing volunteer opportunities, educational tours and genealogical research — points to the fact that Riverside employs two full- time employees who work on upkeep, plus contractors in the summer. Name another “abandoned” cemetery that makes payroll. Or consider the loyal company of active volunteers, around 45 in all, according to Brilz. Thal and Johnson are part of that crew, and they each fell so in love with Riverside that they purchased plots for themselves and their loved ones there. “A lot of people think that no- body in Denver cares about Riverside because they’re expecting grass,” Johnson says. “If we were letting it go to hell, we wouldn’t volunteer our time out there. The other day we had over sixty people from an outside volunteer group come to help clean up the place. If nobody cared, we wouldn’t have that.” Riverside’s boosters, like Brilz, Johnson and Thal, are quick to point out that Riv- erside will likely never be in the fi nancial position to pipe water back in, though they contend that’s probably a good thing. “If you have water continually spraying some of those stones out there, they would be lost because they would just melt,” Brilz says. “I’d rather keep that history than have a big, green, lush, park-like cemetery.” That history, after all, is the main point. Riverside’s importance fl ows not just from the legacies, good and bad, of some of the folks buried there — but by dint of existing as a cemetery at all as burial itself goes out of vogue. Coloradans increasingly prefer cre- mation — which, Keller estimates, accounts for 65 to 75 percent of the disposition of Denver-area remains. Ashes end up scattered to the wind or tightly packed in columbaria, though some are buried. What’s more, by his math, it takes a new cemetery around 22 to 24 years to just break even, and it’s a lot more profi table to use that land to build housing, strip malls or, yes, sewage treatment plants. Concerns about cremation’s carbon emissions give rise to various natural burial movements, whereby the dearly departed are interred without caskets, concrete vaults or the embalming fl uid that became trendy when Abraham Lincoln’s corpse was pumped full of it so that the slain president would look lively to mourners. That could lead to a return to Tomb With a View continued from page 6 continued on page 10 In its early days, Riverside was a model for park-like cemeteries and had a large staff to maintain it. DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY
