Unlocking community space for social and cultural growth in and around Dorchester North Burying Ground in Upham's Corner

PROJECT PROPOSAL 0315

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. Located in the heart of Upham’s Corner, a historically-disinvested district within Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, Dorchester North Burying Ground (DNBG) is a latent cultural landscape rich with heritage, yet severed from the community by physical and psychological barriers. 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 project aims to reframe burying grounds as valuable open spaces for catalyzing social, cultural, and economic community development.

OPEN UPHAMS will test several physical and digital mechanisms for reclaiming the often forgotten DNBG as a destination for remembrance of people, places, and experiences that trigger revival of past joys through the present. Founded on the notion that DNBG can serve as a community gathering place in the heart of Upham's Corner, the OPEN UPHAMS project hopes to unite myriad cultures – Cape Verdean, Haitian, African American, Caucasian, Dominican, and Vietnamese - as well as diverse generational and socioeconomic groups by revealing unknown commonalities and celebrating cherished uniqueness.

MECHANISMS

DOTS 4 DNBG / Named for Dorchester's moniker "Dot", polka-dot inspired, circular stickers will be distributed in the streets and sidewalks around Upham's Corner, as well as popular Freedom Trail cemeteries Copp's Hill Burying Ground, King's Chapel Burying Ground, and Granary Burying Ground. Informational stickers will include stories and photographs revealing the lives of historic figures buried in Dorchester North Burying Ground, the most under-resourced of the bunch.
MEMOIR DOTS / Blank polka-dot inspired, circular stickers will be distributed in the streets and sidewalks around Upham's Corner, encouraging passersby to write and share their own stories in only six words.
SERVED UP WITH LOVE / Removable, customizable, transparent, water-proof containers made of recycled material will be designed for installation along DNBG's decorative iron fence for use as mini memorials honoring Upham's Corner volunteers and loved ones: living and passed. Empty mini memorials, with explanatory labels, will encourage community participation and individual creativity. Prototyping and DIY Instructions to be provided -- SERVED UP WITH LOVE may remain a speculative proposal.
LIFE: DNBG / Inspired by Milton Bradley's Game of Life, America's first popular parlour game. This on-line surname index allows readers to simulate Uphams Corner's past by traveling through life journeys of its people, from their education to retirement, with employment, marriage, and possible children along the way. The multimedia platform will include photographs, document links, written texts, and sounds evoking senses of the digitized present with life stories from the analog past. LIFE stories will follow personal accounts of diverse Dorchester residents buried in, as well as, outside DNBG. Visitors will be able to add their own surnames, with relevant life details, to the on-line index.
PROJECTION / An unsuspecting audience of Dublin House pub crawlers and Stoughton Street / Columbia Road traffic intersection dwellers may discover moving pictures on DNBG's bland concrete walls. Documentation of Project Open Up will be posted on-line. Popcorn anyone?
SURVEY / An on-line survey will seek input on what others think about the relevancy of cemeteries and burying grounds as public space.

BACKGROUND

Designated in 1633, DNBG is one of America’s oldest cultural landscapes and heritage sites, currently maintained by Boston’s Parks and Recreation Department. Nearly four hundred years old, its L-shaped property contains 3.19 acres of green space and approximately 2,600 surviving grave markers that reside latent in Uphams Corner.[1] Formerly Cemetery Corner, Uphams Corner’s commercial district surrounds DNBG at the junction of Dudley Street, Stoughton Street, and Columbia Road in Dorchester. Poverty, youth violence, housing, and an increase in single-parent families are challenges facing the community; they create demand for developmental landscapes that bridge economic, cultural, and generational boundaries.[2]

SOURCES: [1] “Report and Inventory Volume I Dorchester North Burying Ground.” Boston: Historic Burying Grounds Initiative, 1986: 1, 18-19. [2] Jones, Tamecia and Rudy Mitchell. “Uphams Corner Neighborhood Briefing Document.” Boston: Youth Violence Systems Project, 2008: 9-19.

PRECEDENTS

TIMELINE

Mar 19-22 / Installation of DOTS 4 DNBG & MEMOIR DOTS throughout Boston
Mar 23-24 / Photo documentation of DOTS 4 DNBG & MEMOIR DOTS
Mar 25-28 / LIFE: DNBG will be expanded to include stories of esteemed persons from the modern day Upham's Corner community
Mar 29 / OPEN UPHAMS Mixed-Reality City Review
Mar 30-Apr 5 / SERVED UP WITH LOVE Prototyping & SURVEY distribution
Apr 13 / PROJECTION testing upon night fall (weather permitting)
May 14 / Final

ABOUT

Documentation of OPEN UPHAMS by Beth Lundell Garver (MAUD) initiated for course Mixed-Reality City, Spring 2013, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.