The intersection of Kingshighway and Gravois is still a busy one. This isn’t the kind of place where visitors arrive to find a neighborhood in tatters. But looking around, you do see that there’s been a lot of change. A discount market, for example, sits on the footprint of the old Kingsland Theater. The Concordia Turners complex is still a gym facility, but clearly not drawing the numbers it once did. And the landmark Gardenville School sits right at the elbow of those two major streets, no longer active, and one of the multiple City schools on the roster of for-sale properties.
Within that context, the oddity of St. Marcus Park fits a bit more snugly. According to a variety of web sources, including some intriguing genealogy pages, the St. Marcus Cemetery was essentially defunct by late ‘70s, with many graves and markers moved not far up Gravois to the New St. Marcus. Meanwhile, the old facility was eventually cleared of brush and commissioned for a new usage as a City park, one without ballfields, playgrounds, picnic benches, or anything to take aways its role as a “passive” walking park. As our monthly theme has been built around the twin concepts of “weird” and “spooky,” a trip back to the park was necessitated after maybe a year away. And that first trip was a quickie, a lagniappe of exploring coming after a couple of more daring outings earlier in the afternoon. That day, St. Marcus seemed a curiosity, but one to be sampled and then explored later, with more time and energy.
Last Friday afternoon provided a perfect opportunity to set off for the park and with a lovely sky overhead and the temps crisp, but walkable.
As for our monthly thematic indicators, it can be seen as a bit “weird” to walk about a cemetery when no one you know is buried there, sure. Yet cemeteries worldwide are considered tourist attractions, depending on the historic nature of them, or the sheer scale, or when a famed inhabitant lies within. Many, many, many of the graves of the Old St. Marcus have clearly been lost to time and varied headstones and monuments drift across the hilly landscape of the facility. Though a city park, it’s not been planted heavily either, giving the area an interesting, sparse feel, with bungalows lining two edges of the cemetery and City streets adding the other pair of boundaries.
The “spooky” component is equally hard to peg. There are moments when you traipse across the space and you come across what’s surely a collapsed grave, the ground suddenly giving way; there, a sizable divot, or indent cuts into the otherwise well-maintained lawn. Some of those have a headstone nearby, though others happen without a marker, a plot of grass suddenly and simply giving way to a more earthen hue of brown, the terrain shifting and the merest hint of something below coming alive. When hiking through St. Marcus on a gorgeous autumnal afternoon, the sun coaxing brilliant colors from the transitioning leaves, you can only view the space as something profound, much moreso than spooky.
At the top of the park, nearest to Gravois, a small memorial plaza sits, with cut-ins between a more-or-less rectangular sequence of stones. It’s a modest, little plaza, really, and the kind of place where a single, 50-something man can sit on a fall afternoon, tossing out torn slices of bread for both birds and squirrels. I met the gaze of just such a gent on Friday, waved, and got a wave in return. I wondered, as anyone would, if he was from the neighborhood, maybe the little, one-block street that runs along the western edge, Cecil. Or maybe he’d come out to visit a loved one and took a bag of animal snacks, just because.
Surely, there are some that look at the park and wonder what was, not because they are curious about urban spaces, but because they have family at rest in the Old St. Marcus. It’s still a cemetery, of sorts, dotted by those couple-dozen tombstones, many of them bearing German script and dating back to the mid-1800s. In fact, one website offered some proof of that.
In a conversation thread about the lost graves of the St. Marcus Park, the thread-starter mused on the Halloween parties thrown by local teens, a riff that later commentators confirmed with embellishments. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if, in a few days, some of our contemporary local teens found their way in there, just ahead of the local police, surely ready for the annual visitors.
Ken Walker’s letter, dating to 2000, ends in an interesting, somber fashion: “My Grandparent's graves are now the site for beer bashes and picnics. Out there somewhere under the weeds and beer cans are also the bodies of two little girls ages 1 1/2 and 3, who died just days apart. Their heartbroken parents buried them in what was supposed to be hallowed ground. For some 80 years after the girls died, their sisters (my Grandma and Great Aunts) faithfully came to visit their graves every year. Sadly grandma was in no condition physically to care for the gravesites herself but she did try to get the proprietor to keep the cemetery in at least some semblance of repair. She died knowing her sisters were lost forever beneath St. Marcus Park.”
There were no parties in the St. Marcus on Friday, and no evidence of previous ones. Just a couple of individuals, one there to sit, one there to walk. taking in a scene neither weird, nor spooky, but definitely a bit curious. And a whole lotta contemplative.
