The space per person is not particularly roomy, usually 32 inches wide, 26 inches high and 7 feet long. But the three-level building itself is huge for its kind, prices are competitive and seismic safety is state of the art.
About a year before scheduled completion, backers say that more than half of the 8,998 units already have been sold in this $5-million project in East Los Angeles. Marketing pitches emphasize that residency can be long--very, very long.
Possibly forever inside a crypt at Gethsemane Mausoleum in Calvary Cemetery.
That giant construction project by the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese represents a new, larger dimension in interment. The concrete-and-granite honeycomb also is part of a mausoleum building boom that is changing the look of and traditions at religious, nonsectarian and for-profit cemeteries across Southern California.
The prospect of aging baby boomers crowding cemeteries as they once packed college campuses reinforces concerns about a projected shortage of burial space in many urban cemeteries. So, to ensure what the industry unsentimentally refers to as enough "inventory" 20 years from now, cemeteries are building or planning new mausoleums, and in unprecedented sizes.
"I call it an apartment house where nobody knows their neighbors," said Gerald A. Larue, a USC professor emeritus of religion who teaches a class about death and dying. The new high-rise mausoleums, he added, reflect the mass standardization throughout American culture. "It's in keeping with the way we live anyway."
Because Southern California often leads the nation in lifestyle trends, Larue and other experts predict that the dozen or so large mausoleum projects being built or planned here may be the national model for the future.
New economies of scale operate in mausoleum hallways half as long as football fields and in vertical stacks of seven final resting places per floor, three floors per building. New marketing and pricing plans seek to reverse social attitudes that say mausoleums are mainly for the affluent and that burial in the ground is somehow more proper than sliding a coffin into a wall shelf, called a crypt or tomb.
Crypts inside the large, so-called community mausoleums are being pitched as an eco-friendly alternative to cremation--which has gained in popularity over the past two decades, most dramatically on the West Coast.
