Patt Morrison: Take a walk through L.A.'s spectacular, neglected and paved-over cemeteries

“Have you had any snow yet?” Hazel asks a correspondent in Topeka, Kan., on the reverse of this postcard, which is postmarked January 1948, from Patt Morrison’s collection. In the sylvan acreage of cemeteries like Forest Lawn, we now give death the space to be just one more extreme lifestyle choice, where the body — tanned and tended in life — is, in the words of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh, “more chic in death than ever before.” A person named Ruby wrote to a correspondent in Ohio that “We really are having a wonderful time,” on the reverse of this 1957-postmarked postcard, showing the entrance to Forest Lawn in Glendale, from Patt Morrison’s collection. In 1876, after the city had found more profitable demand for the hilltop — lordly houses, and a beer garden — there came ghoulish warnings about “pestilence-spreading gasses which are given forth by decomposed and decomposing bodies.” As late as 1909, The Times fretted that the high school’s track and field athletes were forced to hurdle graves and dodge tombstones for want of a proper field, and that “in warm weather, the place makes a good sleeping ground for many tramps and hobos.” Eventually, identified bodies were slowly moved to the new Evergreen and Rosedale cemeteries. Hollywood Forever, founded in 1899, is, unusual among old L.A. cemeteries, assiduously tended, with attractions for the sprightly living — yoga classes, author events, summer movie screenings and party spaces; I once went there for an after-party for a season premiere of “The Walking Dead.” It abuts Paramount Studios, which sits on land bought from the cemetery. Forest Lawn’s SoCal “memorial parks” you likely already know, the place Smithsonian magazine called the “Disneyland of graveyards.” So here are some other places to visit: Altadena’s Mountain View, 60 foothill acres, with my favorites, Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, the Black sci-fi author Octavia Butler, and quirkiest of all, a-moldering in his grave, Owen Brown.