Broken Angels: Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery
It’s hard to imagine a time, not that long ago, when Los Angeles was not an endlessly sprawling metropolis but a relatively small city slowly growing outward from the plaza built by the Spanish near today’s Olvera Street. This was the LA of the late 19th century, when California’s statehood was still fresh and the city of angels was still decidedly a frontier town. With improved transportation and communication networks, more and more people moved west to try their fortunes and build new lives in California. Los Angeles, then as today, was a haven for misfits and dreamers, a Shangri-La for seekers of all sorts.
At this time, tentacles of boulevards were just starting to slink outward from downtown, rearranging the orientation of the street grid to the north-south alignment preferred by the Americans. Houses and commercial buildings started vying for space, and simultaneously the traditional churchyard cemetery could no longer properly accommodate the remains of larger and larger congregations. As the growth of the city accelerated and graveyards close to the center of the city began to literally and figuratively lose ground, civic organizations used their pooled resources to purchase land and open new cemeteries on what was then the urban periphery. In 1884, the Rosedale Cemetery Association purchased 65 acres between Venice and Washington Boulevards and opened LA’s first non-segregated cemetery, offering interment to anyone who could afford it. Capitalism had come to the graveyard. The LA Times praised the cemetery’s location as a “beautiful and convenient” site, “one of the choicest in the city,” particularly well-chosen in light of the city’s impending growth. The gently sloping hillside afforded an excellent view of “the whole of the valley, and on clear days the ocean,” and Angelus-Rosedale’s verdant plots quickly became home to many non-white Hollywood stars and civic figures.
The cemetery installed the nation’s second crematorium three years later, becoming a highly progressive last resting place for early Angelenos. Although cremation wasn’t popularized in the U.S. until much later, Rosedale attracted those who preferred the new disposal option. Until the mid-20th century cremation was still considered relatively foreign, but the increased population density of urban areas led cremation activists to tout it as a safe, hygienic, and efficient alternative to burial and a way to conserve precious urban space. In an 1887 treatise, Hugo Erichsen describes devoting an estimated half million acres “of the best land in the United States” to cemeteries as “an outrage!” As real estate became a commodity and using vast swaths of urban land for burial of the dead began to seem unnecessary and antiquated, cemeteries fell prey to the untrammeled march of development and speculation. Combined with the belief that dead bodies contaminated the ground, pro-cremationists argued that the new method provided a clean and efficient alternative to ground burial. After the first cremation in the United States took place on the East Coast in 1873, crematoriums quickly spread across the nation. The preference for cremation continued to grow, particularly after 1963 when the Catholic Church finally permitted it. Today, more than half of Americans choose cremation over ground burial.
In 1919, Rosedale came in conflict with community activists with their proposal to build a mausoleum to house above-ground crypts. Perhaps due to the public health panic caused by the recent flu pandemic, neighbors worried that the mausoleum posed a danger to the surrounding area. Property holders around the cemetery filed petitions with the city to prevent the construction, but, after a struggle, the Board of Public Works approved the permit and the mausoleum was built.
Today, Angelus-Rosedale (renamed after its 1993 purchase by the Angelus Funeral Home) sits surrounded by what is now central Los Angeles and still offers services and beautiful views.
For those drawn to the patina of age, Angelus-Rosedale boasts a wealth of time-worn statues and monuments in various states of scenic decay. Angels with broken wings and arms, cracked and shifted headstones, and cobweb-laden crypts offer wonderfully eerie imagery and remind us that nothing, not even the costliest marble, truly lasts. Families move, dissolve, forget.
Due to the cemetery’s age, it isn’t surprising that children’s graves are startlingly common. The early 20th century was a rough one for infant mortality in the U.S., as elsewhere — the rate in 1915 was 1 death in 10 as opposed to today’s 1 in 165. The multitude of miniature gravestones, topped by sculptures of tiny lambs and angels, some naming multiple siblings, starkly remind the visitor that it wasn’t entirely uncommon for parents to bury multiple infant children.
One of the cemetery’s youngest and most enigmatic residents is 2-year old child actor Pauline Flood. Apparently a prolific fixture in early films (as prolific as a baby can be, I suppose), Pauline was tragically killed by an automobile when she wandered away on a film set in 1917. This death certificate, found on Allen Ellenberger’s Hollywoodland blog, along with a brief reference in Mikita Brottman’s Car Crash Culture, is the only evidence I could find of her short existence. Pauline’s body purportedly rests in an unmarked grave, somewhere among the many other young children and babies buried in Rosedale.
As common as familial graves are, a particular mother-daughter grave with the same death year prompted me to do some additional research that led me to the Andrews family’s story. Originally from Ohio, Idelette Andrews, “with her flaming eyes, auburn hair and musical enthusiasm,” was a talented professional pianist and seems to have been a popular figure in the Dayton music scene. After moving to Los Angeles, she cared for her ailing mother Margaret, who died of “the grip” in February 1899. According to the Xenia Daily Gazette, Margaret Andrews was well-known in the city of Dayton, where she resided with Idelette for 16 years prior to moving to Los Angeles.
“A woman of marked character, strong in her convictions, generous in her disposition, able and executive in all practical matters, she filled her life with good works, and now she is at rest. The love and sympathy of hundreds of friends will reach out to the daughter, whose unselfish devotion to her mother has been so rare and so beautiful.”
Idelette, who died only a few months after her mother, was also remembered fondly. She “gave much to Dayton while she lived; when she died — too soon, much too soon — she left to the Dayton Public Library her extremely varied and valuable musical library.” Since I found no published cause of death for her, I can only surmise that she succumbed to the same disease as her mother, dying later the same year.
The theme of early and tragic death continues throughout the cemetery, including in some of its most imposing structures. The Shatto family’s pyramidal crypt houses George and Clara Shatto, a couple who played a minor but significant role in the early development of Los Angeles. The name wouldn’t have stood out to me if not for the fact that I lived a few blocks from one of the two streets in Los Angeles named for the Shattos (as well as a wonderfully dingy bowling alley, Shatto Lanes). It turns out that the Shattos, particularly Clara, helped shape the surrounding neighborhood and donated large parcels of land that now hold parks, hospitals, and churches.
George, a self-made real estate speculator, moved to California from Illinois with his young wife Clara, determined to make a new start after the untimely death of their 8-month-old son. George purchased properties around Southern California, including Catalina Island. He built the island’s resort town of Shatto, which, upon good advice from a sister-in-law, he renamed Avalon, as well as the Hotel Metropole there. Although he eventually lost ownership of the island due to unfulfilled mining prospects and failed business partnerships, he continued to develop holdings in Los Angeles, including what was then referred to as Orange Heights just west of downtown and Bunker Hill.
George’s life was cut short in a strange and tragic train accident. While on a business trip in the Mojave, he received word that his wife Clara was ill and decided to rush home to Los Angeles. Having missed the last passenger train of the day, he caught a ride in the caboose of a freight train. As the freight train sped towards LA, it encountered another train moving northward on the same track, forcing it to slow down. Because George’s train was an hour late, another southbound train behind it was unaware of the slowed train ahead of it. The southbound train collided with the back of George’s train, killing the only passenger sitting at the very back of the caboose — George Shatto.
Clara was devastated by the news of her husband’s death, but she went on to develop their business holdings and become an entrepreneur in her own right. She donated substantial parcels of land to the city and, today, a low wall originally belonging to the Shattos’ ornate first home is still visible along the edge of the Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. The Shatto home served as nurses’ quarters until it was demolished to make room for modern additions to the hospital, which is still in operation today. In 1968, the hospital had its own brief moment of infamy when Robert F. Kennedy was rushed to Good Samaritan after being shot at the nearby Ambassador Hotel. Clara lived into her eighties and, as far as I can tell, never remarried or had any more children. She was a self-proclaimed capitalist and a major philanthropist, and donated the parcel that is now Lafayette Park (formerly Sunset Park) to the city with the clear instruction that it be reserved as parkland in perpetuity. Due to an agreement she made with the developer Gaylord Wilshire, she also reserved part of the Sunset Park land for a segment of the new Orange Street, which later became the eponymous Wilshire Boulevard and one of the city’s most important thoroughfares. Other parcels donated or previously owned by by Clara include the First Congregational Church on 6th Street and much of the neighborhoods known today as Westlake, Koreatown, and Rampart Village. She died at age 89 in 1942.
The Shatto name lingers, disembodied, stamped on the former haunts of its bearers. The Andrews women are guarded over by a modest but well-tended gravestone in their adopted hometown. Little Pauline Flood, wherever she is, rests anonymously. This is where I tie all these stories together neatly with a sweeping thematic conclusion. But what better theme is there for an LA cemetery than the very lack of cohesion between its residents? What’s more LA that a motley assortment of non-native dreamers, performers, and entrepreneurs thrown together on a palm-studded hillside? Angelus-Rosedale represents a spectrum of class and influence, of goals and desires, of success and tragedy — a diversity mirroring that of the ever-changing metropolis still growing and evolving around it.
All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.
Sources:
Dayton Daily News, September 2, 1899
LA Times November 22 1884 “The Opening of a New Cemetery in this City”
Xenia Daily Gazette, February 11, 1899
http://allanellenberger.com/in-memory-of-pauline-flood-also-known-as-baby-sunshine/comment-page-1/
http://angelusrosedale.com/history.php
http://www.cemeteryguide.com/ClaraShatto.jpg
http://www.cemeteryguide.com/gotw-shatto.html
http://www.daytonhistorybooks.com/an_intimate_history_19.html
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/107101330
https://www.lapl.org/sites/default/files/visual-collections/maps/map0026.jpg
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4363l.la000023/?r=-1.106,-0.071,3.213,1.325,0
