Carreta as a historic memorial park

There are many models for Mayor Mike Rama in his plan to develop the old Carreta cemetery into a park.

Manila’s Paco Park, complete with an amphitheater, is just one of these. I understand there was already a plan way back in 2008 prepared by the Harvard-trained Cebuana landscape architect Socorro Atega but which I must confess I have not seen yet.

Judging from the announcement made by the good mayor, the cemetery is apparently going to be turned solely into a park, with many of the deceased who are buried there to be removed soon.

If so, I would not agree with this proposition for a number of reasons.

The first that immediately comes to mind is the fact that there are mausoleums and graves within this storied cemetery which are, well, storied.

That is, these funerary structures are replete with historical and artistic value as much as the persons that are buried in them.

It is not just the Osmeña Mausoleum that is in fact worth preserving as announced by the mayor.

Originally constructed akin to a Greek pantheon shortly after the sudden demise in 1918 of Doña Estefania Veloso, the first wife of Don Sergio Osmeña, the building used to lord it over the landscape in the early 1920s.

But located a few steps away from this grand funerary edifice is an Art Deco mausoleum, owned by the Jerez family, who gave every household in Cebu much-needed comfort from the tropical heat through the huge family ice plant that once stood near the Carbon market in pre-war years.

The tombs inside this grand edifice are covered in marble panels carved with tell-tale Art Deco motifs.

These were most probably imported from Carara, Italy in the 1920s. Other marble statues also dot many of the burials plots of the Sottos, the Ralloses and other families whose names recall many pre-war political skirmishes as well as entrepreneurial successes.

There is one huge plot of the Cuencos and the resting place of Sen. Manuel C. Briones and also of Fructuoso Ramos, former mayor of Cebu, just to name a few.

Indeed, more than removing these plots, these should in fact remain. The cemetery can be adaptively reused of course, complete with musical performances a la Paco Park.

But the best way to preserve this cemetery is to develop a section of it into one huge interpretation center about funerary art, about the old families of Cebu and about the changes in burial practices as well as funerary rituals over time.

Here one can still find the original, Spanish-era niches made of cut coral stone and lime mortar which were arched with red bricks.

Too small for a coffin, these niches once held the dead who were wrapped in cotton sheet after removal from a reusable coffin provided for use in overnight wakes by the Roman Catholic church during a time when embalming was a luxury.

Like a car, the only way to maintain this cemetery is to allow the old families still occupying this small space in the metropolis to continue to maintain their plots while giving way to areas where there will be pockets of greenery for people to sit and relax.

It is simply impossible to spend time there now because of the many informal settlers that call the place home.

Once they are moved to a resettlement area and the place is spruced up, I am pretty sure the great grandchildren of the Cuencos, Ralloses, Brioneses, Osmeñas, Chiong Velosos, Sottos and other prominent families would be more than happy to pitch in as much as the lowly Juan de la Cruz whose tiny ploys are marked by small rectangular “lapidas” on the ground.

In a previous column about what to do with the old Carreta cemetery, I referred to the Ohlsdorf Cemetery, which at 340 hectares is the world’s largest cemetery.

It continues to be used today while allowing visitors and tourists to ponder on Hamburg’s history written in the lives and deaths of those buried there.

In Singapore, at the civic center where many museums and cultural institutions are found, one finds the Armenian Church. Fronting its entrance is a small grassy garden lined with white tombstones, some broken, others still intact.

In between are marble benches. Here in the serene atmosphere of an old cemetery, one can rest amid the dog-eat-dog environment that is Singapore.

I agree with Mayor Mike in his bid to build more and more parks for people to rest. Who knows preserving the character of Carreta might in fact work out into a good public-private partnership project, one that will spill over to the unkempt and utterly dirty environment this once-great cemetery has found itself in today.

There are so many angels and other statues dotting the landscape of this cemetery, made of marble, that were carved by hand by the equally famous Oriol and Sons of Manila.