Six feet up and not six feet under is increasingly the direction in which people want their remains stored when they die, representatives of the funeral industry say. In addition to custom single-family mausoleums, community mausoleums for both coffins and cremated remains are also gaining popularity; in classical or contemporary styles, these often have room to hold hundreds of niches for coffins or urns.

The Cold Spring Granite Company, among the country’s largest makers of cemetery monuments, sold 2,000 private mausoleums last year, up from about 65 during a good year in the 1980′s. Prices range from $250,000 to “well into the millions,” said Michael T. Baklarz, a vice president of the company.

Not everyone wants an elaborate burial. According to the article

industry experts say that more than a quarter of the 2.3 million people who died in 2004 were cremated – and some opted for new forms of interment like the “green burials” that flickered onto the cultural radar after a character from the HBO series “Six Feet Under” was buried unembalmed and without a coffin, in an unmarked grave protected by a nature preserve.

Yet the brief buzz about eco-burial, executives from America’s nearly $15 billion funeral industry say, may obscure the larger reality that, as in seemingly every other facet of contemporary life, the taste for personalization has touched the funeral industry in time to provide an otherwise static business with an opportunity for growth.

It seems like the funeral industry is becoming more proactive. Instead of waiting until death occurs and pitching affordable options, they’re going after the still-living wealthy.

I hit the gas in the turbo Saab and find the white pickup parked just over the first hill, with a driver inside! My personal saviour. I pull up along side of him and sheepishly ask if he’d open the gate for me. I’m not saying he looked a lot like John Carradine’s character in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery episode The Big Surprise” but he was close enough. With a grin he says: “Skeered ya, didn’t I? Sometimes that’s the only way to get you people out!” The insane are not without their charms.

But as Bill Cosby would say, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. The main reason I now pay close attention to closing times is because of an adventure my brother and I had at Woodlawn Cemetery in the North Bronx, NYC. This was maybe in the summer of 2002. I convinced him to take the train with me from Philadelphia to the Bronx to go shooting in this grand old Victorian cemetery called Woodlawn. It’s all the way at the end of the subway/elevated line at the Woodlawn stop, a pretty rough neighborhood.

The main gate was about 8 feet high, and of wrought iron. My brother made special note of it, and commented on the 4:30 closing time. Well, we both shot to our heart’s content and toward the end of the day, began making our way toward the main gate. I, of course, had my head turned by the magnificent Belmont mausoleum. This is a full-scale replica of the Chapel of St. Hubert in France’s famed Loire valley. It was designed by Leonardo Da Vinci in the “Gothic Flamboyant” style in the early 1500s. Da Vinci’s remains were placed in a sarcophagus in this original chapel. So this ain’t no ordinary mausoleum. After we exhausted our film on the gargoyles and flying buttresses (I don’t know what those are but I always wanted to say it), we realized it was 4:45! Hence, to the gate! But alas, she was closed!

It took me about a minute a side to scale up one and down the other, camera gear in tow. My poor brother, though, had such a horrendous time! He cursed me coast to coast the whole while it took us to get him out. At the point he was sitting on top of the closed gate with me outside talking him into a safe descent, people driving by must’ve thought us insane (“Why are they trying to get out? Its certainly safer inside.”). But we got him out. Took about a half hour. To cool him down (in more ways than one) I bought him a couple beers at the biker bar under the el across the street. Then we took the long series of train rides home.

As an aside, I came to find some time later that this gate, the Jerome Avenue gate of Woodlawn Cemetery, was the site of a clandestine meeting related to the supposed kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. One evening, a police officer reported seeing a man sitting on top of the closed gate talking with one on the sidewalk outside the gate. These men were believed to be Charles Lindbergh’s agent (Dr. John Condon) and the kidnapper/extortionist. For more on this, as well as photographs of the gate, please click here.

Read more about Woodlawn Cemetery and the Da Vinci chapel in Douglas Keister’s book Going Out in Style – The Architecture of Eternity.