San Francisco's "Dove Cove"

Last night a nice crowd in SFPL's Koret Auditorium enjoyed watching Trina Lopez's A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Lost Cemeteries , her documentary about "the hidden history of how this modern metropolis managed to systematically relocate nearly all of its burial grounds to make room for the living."

Trina got some terrific stories on tape from native San Franciscans with childhood memories of playing in the graveyards. One of the most compelling and charming characters in her documentary is Emmitt Watson, caretaker and unofficial historian of the SF Columbarium, now owned and operated by the Neptune Society.

Here is a "Finding My Religion" interview with Watson by David Ian Miller on sfgate from 2006, definitely worth a read. My favorite question/answer:

"Where do you want to go as your final resting place?

In a paint bucket inside the house. I got the idea from some of these families here. They put objects in their apartments, whatever their loved ones treasured. I want to be in a paint bucket because I'm a painter. That's what I do. Besides, my loved ones need the money. I don't need no $5,000 casket."

Here are a few links with information about the Columbarium, which is open to visitors Monday through Friday from 8:30AM to 5:00PM – Saturday and Sunday from 10:00AM to 3:00PM:

San Francisco Reader essay
Broke-ass Stuart on the Columbarium
SF Oddities: The Roman Columbarium: House of the Living Dead

Colma's Molloy's Bar: For Wakes of the Irish

When I was attending UC Berkeley in the late 1980s, a friend introduced me to the splendors of Colma. She and I were both interested in photography, and as righteous members of the artistically-minded-Bauhaus-listening set, we fell prey to the lure of the iconography of the cemetery.

We took semi-regular trips across the bay, down the 280, and past the looming Toys R Us giraffe sign to wander around taking pictures of Colma’s elaborately sculpted crypts and memorial stones and imagining the lives of those there entombed.

But none of the photographs that I took during those trips to Colma are as evocative as this image of “Molloy’s Bar” from the SFPL’s San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection. Although the photograph is ostensibly an image of the wall in a bar, the mirror that centers the composition reveals the forlorn-looking backs of bar patrons hunched over their drinks. The back of the photo is marked, “For Wakes of the Irish” and one can only imagine these bleak backs are connected to hands holding glasses raised in the honor of the dead.

Especially significant is the fact that the image is caught in a mirror, something that shows us the world in reverse and that, for many, has a touch of the “other” world, whether the world of the future, the dead, or Alice’s upside-down through the looking glass world. This image, of backs and mirrors, certainly sums up at least part of the living’s experience of Colma.

-Elise Proulx, Litquake