Harbor View Memorial Cemetery

This place is so quiet and there is rarely anyone here. It is not silent however, and you can be lulled into a peace by the songs of birds that I can not identify and the gently low boom of ships in the harbor below.
There is evidence that people are still remembered by the poinsettias placed on a few sparse graves for the holidays. While here I reflected on the purpose of cemeteries. We could just throw bodies into a big pit and have everyone lose their identities. We could even burn everyone and toss them into the wind, or leave the carcasses out to be devoured by nature.
Instead in this culture we choose to be buried or at least remembered in a cemetery. It is form of therapy. The presence of the tombstone is important because it tells your mind that the person that you loved and cared about did exist. They are not some figment of your imagination like Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
You posses memories because they affected you. You miss them because you cared about them. Seeing the tombstone has the visual effect of sort of pairing the present with the past and fusing those emotions in a strange way. Yes it is stone. Yes it is cold. But it is a reminder of the warmth you once enjoyed that is now buried below.
Of course I am assuming you actually got along with the person buried below.
This is San Pedro’s first cemetery and first church. But strangely it does not feel that old at all. Harbor View is quite small and intimate.
I decided to go here today as a way to end 2008. I understand you have to bury the past. But sometimes we place markers behind to remember what we experience and who we knew.
I had a dilemma that I was torn up and confused about. After spending 15 minutes here, my mind came up with the honest solution.
The only thing that saddened me was that there was a bit of vandalism inside the Church. I hate taggers.
If your going to tag something, leave it more beautiful than you found it. Any idiot can write their initials, street name, or hood in yellow paint. In fact it is expected that you know at least how to do that if you have had a 1^st grade education.

I’ve been meaning to explore this historic-​looking place for quite awhile, and today was the day. I saw the gates were open as I was driving past.
As I exited my car, parked half a block away on the street, I heard Ave Maria coming from the window of an apartment building… it was being played live on a solo guitar.
I used to walk old cemeteries in Chicago, and sometimes I felt unsettled, as if spirits were still around, maybe in distress. Yeah, creepy. There was a Civil War cemetery near my home in Barrington, IL, and it was sad to see the graves of so many teenage women who had apparently died in childbirth. Those times were very different from what we experience today, in so many ways that we often overlook.
Upon entering the cemetery in San Pedro today, the first structure I encountered was a mausoleum, see photo. After a bit of research, I concluded that it might be the Sepulveda Family Mausoleum… wow. It was padlocked up tighter than a drum.
The cemetery grounds are officially a park, btw, part of the City of LA Department of Recreation and Parks. There’s no harbor view, but the views of snow-​capped mountains from higher points in San Pedro today were breathtaking. Last night’s brutal winds blew away the smog, and skies were clear. What a day.
My research reveals that this small cemetery was created in 1889. I discovered the oldest church in San Pedro on the grounds, see photo. This building, San Pedro’s first church, was evidently relocated to its current site. The markers were so weather-​worn that I had trouble reading them. I think the church dates to 1884, and it was locked up tight… but boy would I love to go inside. It’s small and sweet.
I didn’t look at all the grave markers, but most seemed to be for people born in the 1840s through the 1860s. There were also some gravestones for men killed in the 1^st World War.
The oldest marker I noticed was for a person born in 1830.
Many of the markers bore surnames that sounded German or Scandinavian, not sure why.
I could no longer hear the guitar music once I was inside the cemetery, but I don’t believe in coinkydinks. I also think it’s useless to try to analyze the reasons for the intensely spiritual connections I sometimes feel.
Unlike in IL, where I often got that creepy unsettled feeling in resting places of the dead, today in San Pedro all I felt was peace.
The feeling I had was that the souls in this graveyard had long ago risen, had gone on to live their next lives.
So it was interesting… intriguing… to simply appreciate the place for what it is… a piece of history.
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