Reborn: Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery

Vancouver cemetery plots | BCBusiness
Home to many late legendary Vancouverites, Mountain View Cemetery is being marketed as the place “where Vancouver remembers.”

Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery opens up sales 
for the first time since Expo 86.

Cemeteries will always see strong demand, the saying goes, because people are dying to go there. But that’s especially true in Vancouver, where city-owned Mountain View Cemetery is once again selling casket graves after a 25-year hiatus.


The 106-acre cemetery on Fraser Street opened in 1886 and is the final resting place for 150,000 Vancouverites, from first mayor Malcolm MacLean to lifeguard Joe Fortes and sprinter Harry Jerome. Welsh immigrant John Hugh Roberts, noted in cemetery records as “The Last Recorder of the Druids,” has a plot, and the greatest number of military interments in Canada is here. More recently, a 2,000-space columbarium opened in 2008 to receive the ashes of the city’s latest departures.


Until the early 1990s, Mountain View was under the jurisdiction of the city’s health authorities. According to policy rooted in late 19th-century public health concerns, when decaying bodies could contaminate a city’s water supply, municipal cemeteries were as much a public service for the health of the living as a place to honour the dead. Public management in turn sheltered fees from market rates, which put the squeeze on operating funds. While so-called “perpetual care” fees became an option at the princely sum of $37.50 in 1933, the fees were just $40 when they became mandatory in 1965 as part of the $110 lot price. The fees hadn’t changed when grave sales ended in 1986. The cemetery was left in the proverbial hole, with the city subsidizing its annual budget. The subsidy was capped at $820,000 a year in 2004.


The financial straits cast a pall over city ownership of Mountain View, but when a private operator offered to buy Mountain View from the city in the 1990s, public opposition deep-sixed the idea. The city commissioned a study and – as it did with public golf courses, those other manicured properties characterized by holes in the ground – developed a business plan outlining a market orientation for Mountain View.


It’s no surprise, then, that Mountain View manager Glen Hodges sounds every bit like a real estate marketer as he explains the city’s resurrection of casket graves. He is, after all, in the business of presales. Working under the strict provisions of provincial cemeteries legislation, the city acquired 160 vacant plots to resell that were originally purchased at least 50 years ago and whose registered owners were 90 years of age or older. Just over 100 of these plots were tagged for sale. Marketing material was developed offering “a place in history” at Mountain View (tagline: “where Vancouver remembers”).


Three hundred people pre-
registered for the June release of the first phase of 40 graves, capable of accommodating 400 remains (two caskets per 40-year period, and eight cremated remains). Bids were accepted through July 12, and successful bidders came in to select their plots. Buyers had a 30-day grace period in the event of cold feet.


Results of the sale are expected to be known this month, with the information guiding future releases of graves. While there’s strong demand for casket interment sites for religious or cultural reasons, Hodges believes there’s also renewed interest in cemeteries as ritual places to remember the dead – not just once a year through events such as the popular All Souls festival that Mountain View hosts each October.


“It’s nice to have somewhere to go when [you] want to remember dad or grandpa,” Hodges says of the new attitude. “When you’re gone, you need to leave a record somewhere.”