Off the Record

Even after getting my car broken into and seeing the city cops act like complete dimwits, I seem to fall deeper and deeper in love with St. Louis each week. Today I spent my afternoon walking around Calvary and Bellefontaine Cemeteries in North St. Louis. Sara Teasdale, EB Du Bois, the Anheuser-Busch’s, the Lemps, Tennessee Williams, the Laumeiers, the Browns of the shoe company, the Faust family, Sarah Bernhardt, TS Eliot’s Prufrock family and William S. Burroughs are all buried in these places. Some of the mausoleums are extravagant, but most of the monuments are quite modest with a small sculpture or cross on top. Bellefontaine has more varieties of plants and flowers than the Botanical Garden does. Cemeteries were actually built for public park purposes as well as places for burial. For sanitation and city expansion reasons, bodies were moved from Jefferson Avenue northward, in a more rural area–to Bellefontaine, which was built in 1849, the year the typhoid and cholera epidemic hit St.Louis. There are still vast acres available for plot purchase and the walk through the cemeteries is absolutely stunning.