A real estate promoter who subdivides land for live occupancy may be quite pleased if he can break an acre of land into 50-by-100-foot lots suitable for resale to people who can afford to buy and build. He counts himself lucky if he can squeeze six such lots out of an acre. But consider the cemetery promoter, who routinely breaks his acreage into easy-to-own little packages measuring 8 feet by 3 feet, fifteen hundred or better to the acre, each parcel guaranteed tax-exempt. Fifteen hundred burial spaces per acre is an estimate that errs on the conservative side and would today be considered old-fashioned. For one thing, it allows space for the accommodation of the now outmoded headstone, and it allows 15 percent for drives, walks, and little spaces between graves so that the fastidious or reverent may avoid stepping on the graves to get from one to another. The modern “lawn-type” cemetery, the most creative idea of all, utilizes all this wasted space by simply eliminating footpaths between graves (the paths of glory now lead but to the gift shop and museum) and by banning tombstones altogether, thus making possible unbroken rows of snugly packed 7-by-3-foot graves. The tombstone is replaced by standard bronze markers set flush with the ground—a creative idea which (a) enables the cemetery owners to appropriate from the sale of the plaques profits that formerly went to the monument makers for tombstones, and (b) by opening up the area to huge power mowers, [9]eliminates all need for hand-trimming of grave plots and saves 75 percent of the maintenance cost.

To these innovations cemeteries now add a further refinement: the sale of nice, cozy “companion spaces” for occupancy by husband and wife. The advantage to the promoters is that the companions will repose one above the other in a single grave space, dug “double depth,” to use the trade expression. One Los Angeles “lawn-type” cemetery gives this estimate of its land use:

Adult graves	1,815 per acre
Additional graves; made available by reserving one-half of each acre for double-depth interments	907
Babyland (three in the space occupied by one adult)	120
Total number of graves	2,842 per acre

Another, also in Los Angeles, projects 3,177 “plantings” per acre on land used for ground burial.

It must not be thought that this sort of overcrowding is always the most profitable use of cemetery land. As in the conventional real estate transaction, it is more profitable to offer variety, something to suit every purse and give rein to every social aspiration, and cemetery land—like real estate for the living—is priced according to desirability. There are “view lots” and “garden locations” for those who aspire to be housed among the comfortably well-to-do; nice, roomy “memorial estates” for the really rich; crowded, plainer quarters for those accustomed to tract housing. Neighborhoods develop here too along lines of status and prestige, as well as along religious lines; lodges and clubs are represented by sections set aside for Masons, Lions, veterans’ organizations, and the like.

Prevailing prejudices in the land of the living were at one time mirrored in the land of the dead, and racial segregation as practiced on cemetery land paralleled that which prevailed aboveground. As court decisions forced changes aboveground, cemetery segregation fell back accordingly.

The next trend in cemetery development was upward expansion—the community mausoleum. Here indeed was a breakthrough in the space barrier. There may be limits to how deep one can conveniently dig to bury the dead, but when one is building for aboveground entombment, the sky is literally the limit, and ten thousand mausoleum spaces to an acre is a most realistic yield. Referred to disparagingly by cemeterians as “tenement mausoleums,” these are very In and are an enormously lucrative proposition. Structurally and functionally, they lend themselves ideally to the simplest form of block construction, for they consist merely of tier upon tier of cubicles made of reinforced concrete faced with a veneer of marble or granite. Crypt is stacked upon crypt—six or seven high—two deep, on either side of a visitors’ corridor. The most advantageous size for crypts, we are told, is 32 inches wide, 25 inches high, and 90 inches long.

One large mausoleum construction firm suggests putting a whole acre into crypts, offering the most alluring figures on property potential to be realized from the crypt-filled acre: potential gross sales, $4,308,000; net potential, $2,808,000.

All of the clever planning to extract the maximum use from each acre of land would avail little if the cemetery promoter then had to sit back and wait upon the haphazard whim of the Grim Reaper. With the death rate at its present level, he might have to wait a very long time indeed to begin to realize profit on his investment. This barrier has been brilliantly surmounted by the massive “pre-need” sales campaign, employing squads of telemarketers seeking an invitation to invade the privacy of your home. One of the most successful devices in the history of merchandising, pre-need selling is the key to the runaway growth of the modern cemetery business.

As pre-need sales continue to zoom, it cannot be long before every living American will own a grave, or at least have contracted to pay for one on the installment plan. Perhaps it is this prospect of a saturated market that spurs competing promoters in the race to get there first, to range ever farther in extending their chains of cemeteries to take in even the remotest hamlet. Only this can account for the prodigious rate at which cemetery development and mausoleum construction have been piling up. No community is too small to attract the attention of the promoters: Conceptcites the case of a town with a population of less than 750 where a successful 288-crypt mausoleum has been established. A mausoleum building firm reported construction of a 336-crypt “indoor-outdoor” mausoleum in Reserve, Louisiana, which at that time had a population of 1,126.

From the point of view of the cemetery promoter, the special attraction of pre-need selling is its self-financing feature. With little or no cash, he acquires an option on some rural acreage and has it zoned for cemetery use. He has a landscape architect supply him with sketches picturing verdant terraces, splashing fountains, tall cypresses and blooming shrubs, and broad avenues converging on an imposing central “feature” (a word used throughout the trade for “statue”), usually in a religious motif. These can be ordered by catalogue number; popular models are The Good Shepherd, Model 221-Z; Christus; The Sermon on the Mount; The Last Supper. He gets plans and drawings of his mausoleum-to-be from one of the national organizations that specialize in this form of construction. He then contracts with a sales organization that makes a specialty of pre-need selling to handle his sales, and he is in business.

The money comes rolling in, and up to this point not a spadeful of dirt has been turned at the Beautiful Memory Garden; not a cement slab has been poured at the site of the Sweet Repose Mausoleum. It is standard practice in this business not to start construction until at least one-third of all the projected burial and crypt space has been sold. Since this amount is far more than will ever be spent on development and construction, the buyers of these little burial spaces will have furnished the promoter, in advance, with all the capital he will need, and a handsome advance profit as well.

It is not as hard as one might think to extract outrageous-sounding prices from the public, because pre-need payments are customarily made in painless installments over a long period of time. The cemetery owner can, after all, afford to offer generous terms. Unlike any other commodity offered for sale on the installment plan, this one remains always in the seller’s possession, and its use may not be called for until many years after it has been paid for in full. “Sunset View’s ‘Before Need’ ownership plan offers the opportunity for purchasing family lots in monthly installments so small that they are hardly noticeable,” says a circular mailed to me by a local cemetery.