By Art Cowie

Throughout the Province of British Columbia there are municipalities with older cemeteries. These cemeteries offer a wealth of history about the early residents. The City of North Vancouver's "Old Cemetery" on the west side of Lillooet Road is a typical design of the Edwardian period. Many of the monuments are modest, most are upright with inscriptions, shapes and masonary materials are typical of the period. Many of the graves have no marker at all and the landscape has been largely left untamed. The first known burial in the cemetery was for Roy Allan Blackburn, age 22, who died from tuberculosis in 1908.
Starting in the 1930's most municipalities simplified their cemeteries and adopted a no upright marker policy and used instead a variety of ground level lawn markers. This trend has persisted up to recent times when the corporate cemetery industry started to introduce a variety of memorialization including columbariums and individual upright monuments in a more organized landscape setting. Most municipalities, with the exception of West Vancouver which built an innovative stone columbarium garden in 1990, have done very little to respond to current memorial trends.

Change in attitude

Some municipalities have started revisiting their cemeteries and looking for ways to revitalize them to meet the community demand for burial space, improved visual appearance and better use as casual open space. Coquitlam, for example, engaged Eikos Planning Inc. in 1996 to prepare a capacity improvement plan for Robinson Street Cemetery. This facility had been closed to new sales for 10 years, maintenance was being subsidized through the parks department and the community was pressuring council to provide new burial space.
After two years study, design and construction, the new facility, renamed Robinson Memorial Park, was officially opened on October 16, 1999. The design is an innovative new approach to revitalizing municipal cemeteries and will set a trend for municipalities according to Tom Crean, President of AIFFH, Association of Independent Family Funeral Homes. Tom believes that it is vital that municipalities continue to provide burial space and offer expanded memorialization opportunities to the public on a local municipal basis.

Robinson Memorial Park A one hectare largely unused treed area of the old cemetery has been changed into a park like setting with memorial walls, a new office and service building and opportunities for memorial columns, sculpture and attractive gardens. The neighbourhood has gained an improved park like space and the community has a cemetery facility that will last for at least 10 years more while a new cemetery is planned elsewhere in the municipality. The initial capital cost for phase one improvement was $1.5M including the street upgrading. The project is operating on a cost recovery basis with funds set aside in a trust for long term maintenance.

Shortage of Land of Cemeteries

Shortage of burial space in older communities will drive the change to modernizing municipal cemeteries. New Westminster's Fairview Cemetery is considered closed yet by redesigning the roadways and slopes it is possible to add considerable memorialization and burial space and at the same time improve the landscape quality of the cemetery. The District of West Vancouver is working on a strategy for adding to Capilano View Cemetery and North Vancouver District is considering options for small memorial gardens. Other municipalities such as Delta, Maple Ridge and Abbotsford in Greater Vancouver have older cemeteries that are running out of burial space and suffer occasionally from vandalism. Robinson Memorial Park could be a model for their improvements.
In Vancouver, Mountain View Cemetery offers the major challenge. The city is subsidizing the facility by $700,000 a year. Opportunities for lessening the financial drain to the city and opening the cemetery for better public access as a arboretum and park with contemporary memorialization were proposed by Eikos in 1995 in a report prepared for the Vancouver Civic Cemetery Society (VCCS). At that time the city was entertaining plans to privatize the facility. As a result of advice from the society the city decided to keep the cemetery under municipal management. In early 1999 the city established a cemetery advisory committee and recommendations have been made for improved memorialization in an enhanced landscape setting in keeping with the suggestions put forward in the Eikos report. While the financial realities of this improvement may be daunting, the opportunities are considerable for this property which has a spectacular setting with views of the North Shore. A bicycle and pedestrian trail through the cemetery along 37^th Street has already been constructed as a first step in improvement.

Every Municipality Should Consider Establishing a Memorial Park

There are municipalities that do not have municipal or other cemeteries. With the scarcity of burial space, this is putting pressure on adjacent communities that are often short of space for their own residents. The City of Richmond is probably the best example of a municipality that doesn't have it's own cemetery in spite of having a growing population that could reach 212,000 persons by year 2020.
A private memorial park "Westminster Gardens"" for cremated human remains has been proposed on Westminster Highway in Richmond . The 5.7 hectare site is an old retail landscape nursery surrounded by a mixture of land uses including a vegetable and berry farm, kennel, golf course, single family subdivision and vacant properties. The memorial park concept is supported by local property owners and it's park like design will help contribute to the rural setting and preservation of the adjacent agricultural land. The sketch below of phase one on a 2.0 hectare part of the property shows two small lakes, a reception/office building, road and pedestrian system, gardens and a generous amount of park like informal landscape with memorial walls, sculpture and other forms of memorialization. There will be ornamental fish in the lakes and wild birds will be encouraged nest and use the property to add interest for visitors. The gardens will remain open during day light hours all year. As the memorial park matures with a collection of quality sculpture and attractive trees and shrubbery and abundant fish and bird life the gardens will become a popular place to visit.

Westminster Memorial Park, Richmond BC

Smaller Memorial Facilities are the Trend

Apart from improving existing cemeteries there is little land available in most established municipalities for a memorial park except in or adjacent to agricultural or forest land. A well designed memorial facility takes up little space and will last many more years than a conventional cemetery. A memorial park could be utilized in perpetuity with the practice of scattering and lease arrangements for plaques as is done in Europe and other countries. Tom Crean and other funeral home professionals recognize that memorial facilities should be located within convenient access to the community and preferably on some transit route. The memorial park concept that has been designed by Eikos for both Coquitlam and Richmond complements other park facilities and adds to the green urban environment.

Art Cowie is a professional planner and a former BC Liberal MLA for the Provincial Riding of Vancouver-Quilchena.