Remembering the dead at La Placita. (Photos: M. Imlay)
Novena candles glow gently in the courtyard of Los Angeles’ Old Plaza Church. They seem a fitting enough symbol, given news a little over a week ago that construction crews working on a new LA Plaza de Cultura y Arte recently unearthed numerous remains of our city’s founding families.
The ensuing chaos has become a slapstick comedy, with fingers pointing every which way.
Let’s see… Everyone knew the site was once the pueblo’s first Campo Santo. Everyone knew that hundreds of early Angelenos had been buried there. And everyone knew — or should’ve known — that 19th Century cemetery exhumations/relocations were often a slip-shod affair.
Yet everyone is shocked, shocked, shocked that coffins and skeletons popped up during a big dig at a graveyard that was supposed to have given up the ghost more than a century ago.
The Plot Thickens
Even more ironic are the apparent initial efforts of LA Plaza officials to hush the discovery, lest construction be shut down. (They are, after all, supposed to be celebrating and preserving the area’s history, not bulldozing it.)
But I also find this quote from the Los Angeles Times’ first report of the discovery a real head-scratcher:
“The original Catholic cemetery on that site, as far as the archdiocese’s records indicate, was not simply closed in 1844 — it was relocated. ‘We removed the bodies,’ [archdiocesan spokesman Tod] Tamberg said. ‘It’s a huge distinction.’ Tamberg said there is no documentation on where the remains went or why bones are there now.”
Coming attraction!
Lack of official documentation aside, Angeleno historians have long agreed that most of the bodies were removed to Old Calvary Cemetery, up Eternity Street, which is now North Broadway. That second Catholic cemetery operated until Los Angeles outlawed burials within city limits in the late 1800s. Thousands of bodies were then again exhumed and relocated to East L.A.’s New Calvary Cemetery by the early 1900s. (Cathedral High School now stands on Old Calvary’s former spot, which is why its football team is called the Phantoms.)
In any event, updates on the latest LA Plaza attempts at damage control can be found here and here.
Plus, here’s the latest reaction from descendants of the early Angeleno families buried at the site.