After visiting a Boston cemetery, Englishman Henry Arthur Bright wrote in the 1850s, “cemeteries here are all the rage; people lounge in them and use them (as their tastes are inclined) for walking, making love, weeping, sentimentalizing, and everything in short.”  The United States owes the invention of public park commons, like Central Park in New York, to the inspiration of cemeteries where visitors flocked in search for calm respites away from increasingly industrialized cities. 

The Portugese word “saudade” describes remembrance of people, places, and experiences that trigger revival of past joys through the present.  OPEN UPHAMS is founded on the hypothesis that Dorchester North Burying Ground can embody communal “saudade” in the heart of Uphams Corner.  As a neighborhood, Uphams Corner includes many cultures – Cape Verdean, Haitian, African American, Caucasian, Dominican, and Vietnamese - as well as diverse generational and socioeconomic groups.

By utilizing historic maps, inventory records, print publications, and online resources (i.e. DorchesterAtheneum.org), OPEN UPHAMS explores physical and digital mechanisms for reclaiming the often forgotten Dorchester North Burying Ground as a destination for sparking revival of past joys through the present.  OPEN UPHAMS investigates methods of utilizing memorials, storytelling, community participation, and tactical urbanism to generate new interest in DNBG and expand the community’s sense of belonging and usage of its currently invisible open space.  Hoping to shift attitudes surrounding limitations of this public terrain, the OPEN UPHAMS reframes burying grounds as valuable open spaces for catalyzing social, cultural, and economic community development.

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LINKS:​ Theatre Image, SouzaPalooza Image, Lanterns Image, Green-Wood Cemetery, Guitare Player Image

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