Why a dusty, dried-up, dying Denver cemetery may represent the future of the afterlife.
When you support our community-rooted newsroom, you enable all of us to be better informed, connected, and empowered during this important election year. Give now and help us raise $12,000 by June 7.A visit to Denver’s Riverside Cemetery sometimes feels more like trespassing than it does paying respects to those fallen folk heroes whose names now grace Colorado's streets, towns, counties and mountains. It certainly doesn't look like a place where life is celebrated.
No matter the season, off in the distance looms the smokestack of the Cherokee Generating Station as the stench rolls in from the largest wastewater treatment facility in the Rockies, just a block away, and tanker trucks lumber to and from Suncor’s refinery, right across the street. Good luck finding much in the way of tree cover to escape the glare of the sun. This is what theCompared to more easterly peers, Denver is a young city.
The founder of Colorado’s first school and first public library, Owen J. Goldrick, is at Riverside. So is Marshall Wilson E. “Bill” Sisty, purportedly Denver’s first law enforcement officer, as well as Sadie Likens, Denver’s first police matron and the second female jailer in American history. The place is positively brimming with members of the prestigious Colorado Society of Pioneers, folks who arrived in Colorado before February 1861 and were formally recognized for helping shape the place.
“It’s really depressing. Sometimes in the summer when you go, it’s just like brown dust and dirt,” says Christine Telea, whose twin sister, Liz, was interred there in 2021 near their parents. Riverside accepted its first burial on June 1, 1876: Henry Walton, whose white marble obelisk still stands, though it disintegrates a little more with each passing year. By that July, Dr. John H. Morrison had joined Walton as the fifth burial, a loss — or perhaps an addition — made poignant by the fact that Morrison was the original owner of the land beneath what would become the cemetery.
The central paradox of a cemetery is that it commemorates the inevitability of the end while also requiring continuous growth. When the burials stop, the money stops — save for interest earned from perpetual-care endowments, which at Riverside doesn’t amount to much. “What a cemetery is selling are burial services and real estate,” says Chris Keller, the treasurer of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association and a Colorado-based cemetery consultant.
As for the parched environs, it isn’t entirely that Fairmount was tired of footing the watering bill for paupers’ graves. Newspaper articles from as recently as 1970 call Riverside “a green oasis in an industrial desert” and feature Fairmount Cemetery Company executives launching a $250,000 improvement campaign while pledging to continue to plant grass and water flowers.
Or consider the loyal company of active volunteers, around 45 in all, according to Brilz. Thal and Johnson are part of that crew, and they each fell so in love with Riverside that they purchased plots for themselves and their loved ones there. “A lot of people think that nobody in Denver cares about Riverside because they’re expecting grass,” Johnson says. “If we were letting it go to hell, we wouldn’t volunteer our time out there.
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