Buying A Used Final Resting Place

Not interested in designing or building your forever home?  There is a niche market that will help you locate and bid on a slightly used final resting place. Are you desiring top-quality granite exterior, marble interior, high ceiling, and custom-made windows?  Then you may be interested in Rev. Norman Vincent Peale's mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City that has been vacant since the 1950s.  This modest mausoleum sleeps eight and is selling for $750,000 with the option of personalizing the entrance with your last name.

In New York, where the city revolves around real estate, it stands to reason that big-money prices and maxims like “location, location, location” figure in death as well. Mausoleums change hands just like apartments and townhouses.  And with cemeteries running short on space, cemetery officials have been known to call descendants who own long-empty grave-sites or mausoleums, and suggest a sale. 

Several mausoleums at Woodlawn Cemetery have been home to famous poets, musicians, and business tycoons.  These mausoleums can often raise their asking price due to their attached reputations and legacies.  William B. Leeds, a tin and railroad tycoon, had his mausoleum designed by famous architect in the early 1900s; Woodlawn Cemetery is asking for $4.2 million.  However, Woodlawn offers smaller mausoleums for a nominal $534,000.

Susan Olsen, the cemetery historian, has found letter records that show the "change of hands" of mausoleums at Woodlawn Cemetery throughout its existence.  These letters show the intent of future residents to build or buy mausoleums on the cemetery grounds.  There is also a history of transition of bodies from "receiving tombs," temporary resting areas while mausoleums are being built, to there years in the mausoleum, to the family deciding on a new resting destination for their dearly departed.

Treating burial spots as a recycling business is a new perspective on cemeteries.  It will be interesting to see if this trend continues to spread to other states as the competition for burial locations exponentially increases

Rivver Cox