How Is Forest Lawn Memorial Park the 'Disneyland of Cemeteries'?

Dream and the Builder's creed. It speaks of a quote, a great park devoid of misshapen monuments and other signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, beautiful statuary, and memorial architecture. The plaques are all signed the builder. Before the article of this episode is based on how Stuffworks. Spoke with James Fishburne, PhD, Director of the Forest Lawn Museum. He said, that's how we refer to Eton the builder. It's very grand. You

get that grand sense when you visit. There are rolling hills, studding landscapes, mountain views, and you can see the ocean in the distance. And then the art collection is also very grand. Forest Lawn is a cemetery, but it's not like any burial place before it. While more than three hundred thousand people are buried there, including some of America's most famous names, it also boasts gardens, churches, a huge mausoleum, and an art museum. It's lively enough that over sixty

thousand people have actually gotten married there. Fishburne said it was designed quote so it didn't feel like a place of death and decay, but rather a celebration of life, a place you would want to visit today. There are six Forest Lawn Memorial Park locations in southern California, but the original is in Glendale. From the beginning, the art has been a major draw a. Fishburne said, one of the early ideas was to sort of recreate what the

Grand Tour used to be. If you were very wealthy, you could go to Europe and travel all over and view amazing cathedrals and sculptures and paintings. To bring that to Southern California in a time when international travel was prohibitively expensive and time consuming, and when there were relatively few publicly accessible art collections in Southern California. The museum houses original art and replicas of famous works, including one

of the largest replica collections of Michelangelo. There's even a reproduction of his famous statue of David that stands seventeen feet tall that's about five point two meters, which is the same grand size as the original. They built an entire building to house another piece in their collection. The largest painting in the West during the United States, Jonstka's The Crucifixion, which is one hundred and ninety five feet wide and forty five feet tall. That's about sixty by

fourteen meters. That's more than twice as wide as an Imax movie screen and nearly as tall. European cemeteries evolved over the centuries alongside different periods of art and religion and thought about death. In the United States, the largest cemeteries on the East Coast were established in the early eighteen hundreds and thus were tied to the conventions of

those times. But when Forest Lawn began on the outskirts of the growing city of Los Angeles, Eton and the founders could rethink those conventions and they got the timing just right to be a new cultural center. Fishburne said, when Forest Lawn was established over a century ago, it was immediately between two population centers. It's located between Pasadena, which was already booming in the early twentieth century, and

downtown Los Angeles. A few years after we opened, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was constructed, and there was just a population boom. At the same time, the film industry was exploding in southern California and movie stars needed a final resting place. Forest Lawn is the burial place of celebrities like Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Nat King, Cole Clark Gable, Michael Jackson, Will Rogers, and Elizabeth Taylor, just to name a few. But don't expect to see a list of

who's who, or rather who's where a Forest Lawn employees. No, people come to see the famous graves, but they won't help you find them. Fishburne said, we try to respect the privacy of the families that we serve, so we don't do celebrity grave tours. We don't advertise X, Y and Z are buried here. Many of the final resting places of celebrities are openly accessible to the public and people are welcome to come visit them. Others are in

locked gardens or in private areas. A Walt Disney is also buried in Forest Lawn, but that's not the only connection between him and this memorial park. A. Forest Lawn's tutor inspired architectural style extends through its many burial sections, which have names like Eventide, Graceland, Inspiration Slope, Sweet Memories, Whispering Pines, and Dawn of Tomorrow. There's also a heart shaped area called Babyland for infant burials and Slumberland for

children and adolescents. It's reminiscent in many ways of the different areas and esthetics of Disney's nearby amusement park. Fishburne said, Eton and Disney ran in some of the same circles, and Forest Lawn and Disneyland share the zeitgeist of the early and mid twentieth century, the sort of storybook style that you see in a lot of early Disney movies and in Disneyland. Forest Lawn is sometimes called the Disneyland of Saries, but Fishburne sets the record straight quote forest

Lawn was founded first. We like to joke that actually Disneyland is the amusement park of Forest Lawn's. Ultimately, as with all cemeteries, it's a place as much if not more for the living than for the dead. Fishburne said, when you visit on the day of a family member's funeral, that's obviously going to be a very intense and very

sad moment. But we want you to be able to come back time and again, bring friends and family and celebrate that person, and celebrate Southern California and celebrate life. Today's episode is based on the article inside LA's Forest Lawn where the biggest celebrities rest in Peace on how

stuffworks dot Com, written by Kate Morgan. Brainstuff is production of Byheartradio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler klang A. For more podcast It's My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.