Las Urbanistas

As property prices spiral upward in Beijing, some tenants in the city’s 600-year-old hutong alleyways are rushing to cash in on their neighborhoods’ destruction.

Alexander Faynberg says he expects his food vending business will improve as Progress Plaza is renovated.

PHILADELPHIA — It seems that anyone you talk to in the streets around Progress Plaza, a tattered shopping center in a mainly black, poor part of North Philadelphia, is excited.

Mike Mergen for The New York Times
Carol Smith says she looks forward to having fresh food closer than the 12 blocks she now has to walk.

There has not been a supermarket nearby since the last one in the plaza suddenly shut down in 1999, part of a nationwide flight from blighted urban areas by many large chains.

But soon a large Fresh Grocer supermarket is set to open here.

“Everybody will be so happy to see a new store,” said Anna Keller, a retired nurse’s aide, as she took home a large bag of items from Popeyes, the fast-food chicken restaurant, in the plaza. In the last seven years, Ms. Keller said, she has driven miles away to shop “because the food around here isn’t worth buying.” But that also means that she has shopped less frequently and often relied on takeout.

“I know I’ll eat better,” she said, talking about the ready access to aisles of fresh produce and meats. “I know this greasy food is killing me.”

Carol Smith, 50, who sat on the stoop of her apartment in a rundown row house, minding her five grandchildren, said she felt the same way. Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Smith does not drive, and she has been walking the 12 blocks to the nearest grocery store, then paying a livery car to drive her back. “It’s hard to keep real fresh things around,” she said.

Depopulation and the loss of industrial jobs in recent decades have taken an especially harsh toll in this neighborhood. They left row houses abandoned or in disrepair, and vacant lots strewn with trash, broken whiskey pints and hypodermic needles. Progress Plaza, which was founded with great hopes in the 1960s by an association of black residents, fell on hard times. Even mom-and-pop stores are rare.

Subsidized development is starting to bring in new houses and families, a longtime development of black-owned homes has survived to the east of the plaza, and nearby Temple University is expanding. But still, within a half-mile radius of the plaza, 39 percent of people live below the poverty line, more than twice the rate for Philadelphia over all.

Whether easy access to the bounties of a supermarket will actually transform eating habits remains to be seen, but the fight against obesity has become a major rationale, along with lower prices and the promotion of wider retail development, for efforts to bring supermarkets to what have been called the food deserts of poor urban areas.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has sponsored a before-and-after study of eating habits around the future supermarket here, looking especially to see if consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, rather than chips and soda, will rise.

The new grocery store is part of a broader renovation of the plaza, aided by millions in public and private loans. The store was lured here by the Fresh Food Financing Initiative, which has subsidized development of two dozen supermarkets in deprived urban and rural areas of Pennsylvania and is considered a national model. The Legislature put up seed money and joined forces with the Food Trust, a private group that promotes healthy diets, and the Reinvestment Fund, which marshals money for community development. The initiative provides cash grants of up to $250,000 and, sometimes, millions of dollars in loans to prospective supermarket developers.

In the case of Progress Plaza, inducements were needed in part because the lot of the former store, at 18,000 square feet, was far too small for today’s supermarket model, said Pat Burns, who owns other stores in the city and will operate the new one here. Most of the plaza is being rebuilt to make room for a flashy 46,000-square-foot market with rooftop parking.

More generally, supermarket operators say, moving into a blighted neighborhood brings special costs and risks that can be partly overcome through subsidies and advice from groups like the Food Trust.

Jeff Brown said he was encouraged to build a ShopRite in another part of Philadelphia by a $250,000 grant from the Food Initiative, which he used to train local workers, many of whom had never held real jobs.

Store operators in poor areas say they have substantially higher security costs and, in contrast to suburban chains that carry essentially the same inventories in all stores, they must stock a variety of lower-volume items geared to multiethnic tastes. Because many customers are poor, a new store must be in a heavily populated area with convenient public transportation if it is to be profitable, they said.

On Broad Street, the supermarket and plaza will have 24-hour lighting, and “that will do a lot for the sense of safety and community in the neighborhood,” said Wendell R. Whitlock, chairman of the association that owns Progress Plaza and has received loans for the overhaul. “This is going to be a happening,” Mr. Whitlock said of the new store, and should give a boost to the area’s renewal.

When Pathmark opened the first supermarket in decades in East Harlem, in 1999, many local store owners were fearful. But by drawing in more shoppers, the entire neighborhood was uplifted, local residents and economists say.

Around Progress Plaza, no one admits to being worried.

Taufiiq Colbert, who just opened a barbershop west of Broad Street, said he expected the increased foot traffic to help his own struggling business.

Even Alexander Faynberg, who has for years sold a small sampling of fruits, nuts and eggs from a truck next to Progress Plaza, said he welcomed a new store. “It will bring in a lot of people,” Mr. Faynberg said. “It will be good for me.”

Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y., held a daffodil brunch in one of its chapels recently as a way to raise money for reconstruction and upkeep. More Photos>

PHILADELPHIA — The dinner was first-class, with butlers serving hors d’oeuvres and the strains of “Blue Danube” tastefully muffling the festive din. This nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard an ill-fated ocean liner was the culmination of Titanic Day at Laurel Hill Cemetery, one of a growing number of historic cemeteries to rebrand themselves as destination necropolises for weekend tourists.

Andrew Councill for The New York Times
At a festival at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington last weekend, there was a parade for dogs dressed in historical costumes.

R.J. Mickelson for The New York Times
In addition to brunch, Oakwood will stage a Renaissance fair this summer, complete with jousting matches.

 

Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar.

Laurel Hill, the resting place of six Titanic victims, promotes itself as an “underground museum.” The sold-out Titanic dinner, including a tour of mausoleums, joined the “Dead White Republicans” tour (“the city’s power brokers, in all their glory and in all their shame”), the “Birding Among the Buried” tour, and “Sinners, Scandals and Suicides,” including a visit to the grave of “a South Philly gangster who got whacked when he tried to infiltrate the Schuylkill County numbers racket.”

As Americans choose cremation in record numbers, Victorian cemeteries like Laurel Hill and Green-Wood in Brooklyn are repositioning themselves for the afterlife: their own. Repositories of architectural and sculptural treasures, like Tiffany windows and weeping marble maidens atop tombs, the cemeteries face dwindling endowments, years of vandalism and neglect, shrinking space for new arrivals and a society that, until recently, collectively distanced itself from their meandering byways.

Although their individual circumstances vary — Green-Wood in Brooklyn, a newly crowned National Historic Landmark, has space for two more years of in-ground burial, while Laurel Hill is virtually full — what they share is a daunting number of tombs in need of repair. Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the final home of Whitneys, a Woolworth, Jay Gould and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, has 95,000 grave sites.

Only 9,000 have endowments, said Susan Olsen, the executive director of the Friends of Woodlawn. “You’re a conservator,” Ms. Olsen said. “You can’t have someone up there with a bottle of Windex cleaning a Tiffany window.”

The new cemetery tourism — a subterranean version of the History Channel — is also a means of developing brand loyalty in the wake of what Joseph Dispenza, president of the historic Forest Lawn in Buffalo, calls a “diminishing customer base.”

Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, Calif., a columbarium designed by Julia Morgan, architect of San Simeon, recently started “Jazz at the Chimes” concerts to reach culture enthusiasts who might be potential customers.

Some cemeteries are betting on infotainment. At Heritage Day last weekend at the 200-year-old Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a 70-piece marching band serenaded the grave of John Philip Sousa, and dog owners held a parade for dogs dressed as historical cemetery personages, including a Union soldier.

A decade ago, prostitutes and packs of wild dogs populated the city’s oldest burial ground, which has monuments designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, designer of the Capitol. Then the preservation association began courting dog owners. Today, the 33-acre cemetery serves as a historical dog park where dogs run in Elysian fields, free to commune with the headstones. Owners pay $125 a year for the privilege, plus $40 a dog — bringing in $80,000 so far. In many ways, it is a throwback to the days of old, when then-rural cemeteries like Green-Wood and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Mass. (1831), rivaled Niagara Falls as romantic tourist destinations. These “gardens of graves” were settings for Sunday picnics and a precursor to Central Park and other great public spaces.

Like many vintage cemeteries, Laurel Hill languished for years in a struggling urban neighborhood, as potential customers drifted to the suburbs. Though the cemetery has a $17 million endowment, most of that is earmarked for specific family tombs and falls woefully short of what is needed for maintenance. “After 170 years, people lose track” of their loved ones, said Ross L. Mitchell, the executive director.

And with only 1 percent of its 78 acres available for new burial, cemetery officials are trying to think of creative ways to mine its distinctive personality. The Titanic tour was the brainchild of J. Joseph Edgette, a professor at nearby Widener University who is tracking the graves of Titanic victims and plans to document all 2,200. “We’re rebranding ourselves as a heritage tourism destination,” Mr. Mitchell said.

For Jason Crabtree, a 33-year-old software writer, and his wife, Melissa, 29, this storied rural resting place, established in 1836, offered “a cross-section of humanity you don’t usually see,” said Mr. Crabtree, explaining the couple’s predilection for weekend cemetery visits.

At a daffodil brunch in April at the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y., omelet chefs whisked eggs amid Siena marble walls and soaring Tiffany windows, in the Gardner Earl Memorial Chapel and Crematorium. The 1848 cemetery has burial space for the next 200 years and an annual operating deficit of more than $100,000, according to Theresa Page, president of the board of trustees.

Its preservation issues are dire: volunteers have been clearing brush that made about 10,000 graves invisible. The grave site of Samuel Wilson, the man behind “Uncle Sam,” America’s national symbol, has been inaccessible for years, since 125-year-old water pipes burst beneath the roads. The cemetery has asked Congress for $1.7 million for reconstruction.

To raise its profile and money, Oakwood will stage a Renaissance fair this summer, with jousting matches among knights in shining armor. It was inspired by a medieval-style wedding there, for which the groom made his own armor.

“We want them to think, ‘Wow, I think I’d like to spend my eternity here,’ ” Ms. Page said of efforts to lure visitors. “It’s a way of saying, ‘We would love you to stay with us permanently.’ “

Certain cemeteries, like Père-Lachaise in Paris, Arlington National Cemetery in Washington and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, have always had celebrity cachet. But the past decade has seen a deliberate marketing of cultural status. At the 175-year-old Mount Auburn, it has meant lectures on the warbler migration by the Massachusetts Audubon Society; at Spring Grove in Cincinnati, tourists in electric trams ride past the grave of Salmon P. Chase, the founder of the Internal Revenue Service (they usually boo).

Forest Lawn in Buffalo spent $1.2 million to erect the Blue Sky mausoleum, a spare design by Frank Lloyd Wright, with 24 crypts from $125,000 to $300,000. Each crypt-owner will receive a Steuben glass sculpture of their eternal home-in-waiting. “It’s about exclusivity,” Mr. Dispenza of Forest Lawn said. “It’s about being one of the 24.”

Gary Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University and the author of “Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in the 20th Century” (Oxford University Press, 2003), says there is “a sense in which, like sex, death sells.” But he also sees cemetery tourism as a chance for civic engagement. The mobility of society and the growth of the death care industry have served to isolate these historically significant places from the mainstream, Mr. Laderman said.

That attitude may be shifting. Laurel Hill, for example, was awarded a $97,000 grant to provide grief counseling for inner-city children grappling with the effects of gun violence.

Of course, some think that cemeteries are sacred spaces, and that Halloween flashlight tours and historical re-enactors jumping out from behind tombs crosses the line in taste.

A 2005 fund-raising calendar for Oakwood Cemetery in Troy — inspired by the movie “Calendar Girls” and featuring socialites who appeared to be naked — was a tad too risqué to repeat, some thought. After objections, Green-Wood scuttled plans to show horror films.

“The cemetery doesn’t have an obligation to entertain,” said Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and writer in Michigan.

Preservationists say desperate times require desperate measures. And “Birding Among the Buried” brings people in, if only for a look.

“The people who built Laurel Hill wanted these monuments to be seen,” said Mr. Mitchell of Laurel Hill. “If we do nothing, isn’t that the ultimate disrespect?”