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.
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