During a break in a concert in the Bronx, Victor Goines, a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, realized that he wanted to spend more time in that very place — a lot more time. Being there would put him close to people he idolized, like Duke Ellington, so he decided to spend US$25,000 to buy the land behind the stage.
The land behind the stage was a cemetery plot, No. 10836 GR2-5, on a slope in the Hillcrest section of Woodlawn Cemetery. It is about 50 yards from where Ellington was buried in 1974, and Ellington is not the only jazz great in the neighborhood.
“The location is prime real estate,” said Goines, who is 52 and does not plan to occupy the plot anytime soon. “I’m looking at Miles Davis, who’s right across the same intersection, and Illinois Jacquet, who’s a couple of plots below where I am.”
Photo: Reuters
It is a different kind of hero worship, and puts a new twist on the real estate cliche “location, location, location.” It could be the ultimate form of devotion, putting yourself closer to someone you admired than you ever were in life — especially if the only words you ever spoke to a favorite celebrity were “Can I have your autograph?” or “Can I take a selfie with you?” — or it could be the ultimate way to elevate oneself. You may not be famous, but proximity to someone who was could bestow some prestige.
It is one of those revealing, unexpected details of life, arranging in death to be slightly to the left or right of a Hollywood celebrity like Marilyn Monroe or a civil rights figure like Rosa Parks. It is not so surprising to people in the funeral business, though.
“It is much like it is if you want to live near your idols,” said Patti Bartsche, the editor of American Cemetery and American Funeral Director magazines. “It has the same cachet — ‘I’m going to be buried near Lionel Hampton’ or ‘I’m going to be buried near Michael Jackson.’ You want to have a connection to somebody who’s important in your life. People choose to be buried, if they choose to be buried, in a place that has meaning to them.”
There are amateur sculptors who arranged to be buried near famous ones like the avant-garde artist Alexander Archipenko. One woman who works at Woodlawn bought a space for her mother near the crypt of Celia Cruz, the Latin music star. And Jacob Reginald Scott, a businessman who was an amateur drummer before his death in 2012, has an image of a drummer on his tombstone, close to the grave of the bebop pioneer Max Roach.
“He had so many records of all the people who are there, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington,” said his widow, Merri Hinkis-Scott. “He admired all the people he happens to be with now.”
And there are people like Pauline Smith, a jazz fan and swing dancer who plans to be buried at Woodlawn near Ellington and Frankie Manning, one of the early creators of the Lindy hop.
“Who knows what life is after death?” said Smith, a retired teacher who is 74 and lives in New Rochelle, New York. “Not knowing what it is, I want to enjoy the thing that brings the most joy to me in my life right now, so I want to be close to them.”
That is the same motivation that prompted Marty Markowitz, the former Brooklyn borough president, to buy a plot at Green-Wood Cemetery adjacent to the graves of two prominent Brooklynites from the 19th century, one a mayor in the days when Brooklyn was a city on its own. “That’s what I wanted even before I became borough president,” he said.
Not surprisingly, graves near the final resting places of famous people can carry premium prices. “Cemeteries love this kind of thing,” said Thomas A. Parmalee, the executive director of the publishing company that produces Bartsche’s magazines and a newsletter, Funeral Service Insider. “When there’s a plot that’s in demand, they can advertise for more money, though I don’t think they go out and advertise because that’s not politically correct.”
A crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s in a cemetery outside Los Angeles sold for US$4.6 million on eBay in 2009. The owner, a widow who wanted to pay off the US$1 million mortgage her husband had left behind, moved his remains 23 years after he had been buried there. (In 1992 Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magazine founder, paid US$75,000 for another crypt near Monroe’s.)
There were reports after Michael Jackson died in 2009 that prices for plots near his in Glendale, California, had jumped more than US$2,000, to US$9,900. And in 2006, after Rosa Parks died, the prices of crypts near where she and members of her family were entombed in a cemetery in Detroit climbed as much as US$15,000.
Some cemeteries pre-empt price-gouging. After Jim Valvano, the Queens-born basketball coach who led North Carolina State to a national championship, died in 1993, Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, laid a sidewalk next to his grave “so that no one could buy that property and sell it at a higher rate,” said Robin Simonton, the executive director. “He was that important in Raleigh that there was a fear that someone would do it.”
She said that the plots closest to Valvano’s grave — a short walk away, on the sidewalk — now go for US$4,000. One was taken when Lorenzo Charles, the player whose dunk won the game, died in 2011 in a bus crash.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50