http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/article/1,,ART-50418,00.html - Homes may be
on horizon for historic city cemetery - By Robert L. Kaiser - Chicago Tribune Staff Writer
- March 11, 2001 - The owner of Rosehill Cemetery, one of Chicago's most revered
historic landmarks and the final resting place of four governors, is planning to sell more
than 22 acres of cemetery land to developers, one of whom is interested in building homes
on the property. Service Corporation International, the global leader in the cemetery
business and the owner of Rosehill, has entered into sales agreements with two potential
buyers, a spokesman said. The pending sale of non-burial portions of the 142-year-old
cemetery is the latest perceived threat to the sanctity of Rosehill, which in the 1980s
was tied up in what one lawyer called "apparently eternal" litigation brought by
lot owners concerned over how parts of the 350-acre cemetery might be developed. Residents
of the North Side don't we!
lcome development of Rosehill, which includes the graves of at least a dozen mayors and
350 Civil War veterans. Walled off from the bustling, noisy streets that surround it and
filled with a breathtaking collection of crypts, obelisks and headstones, Rosehill was
designed as a rural refuge from the city. The land had held farms and a tavern before
Chicago's first mayor, William B. Ogden, decided to put a cemetery there, seven miles
from downtown. But the city caught up. The pending sale of cemetery land provides a window
on the sometimes speculative business of owning cemeteries and funeral homes, which big
corporations have gobbled up only to turn around and sell for a profit or to reduce debt.
"We grew very aggressively in the '90s; it was what was happening in the
industry," said Greg Bolton, a spokesman for Houston-based SCI. Between 1993 and
1998, SCI went from owning 772 funeral homes to owning 3,100. The number of cemeteries it
owned rose from 189 to 395. "That situat!
ion has changed," Bolton said. "All across the country, we're divestin
owner of funeral homes and cemeteries, announced on Jan. 5 that it planned to sell more
than 400 funeral homes and 105 cemeteries nationally to help pay off its debt, which stood
at more than $3.3 billion as of September, Bolton said. In the Chicago area, SCI owns
eight cemeteries and about 40 funeral homes, Bolton said, but those numbers are dwindling
and will continue to drop as the company makes plans to sell more of its holdings in the
area. "We are evaluating all of our operations to determine which locations we will
sell, either as businesses or for their real estate value," Bolton said. Concerning
Rosehill, Bolton said SCI had entered into sales agreements with two potential buyers, one
in November and one in March. Though Bolton would not name either, sources identified one
as Concord Development Corp., a Palatine-based company that builds houses and
condominiums. Rosehill, the final resting place of roughly 200,000 people, is not the
first Chicago-area cemetery that!
SCI has shopped in pieces to developers. A few years after buying Skokie's Memorial
Park in October 1996, SCI sold off 10 acres, and a shopping center sprang up across the
street from Old Orchard. "I do not believe SCI is either in the funeral business or
the cemetery business. They're really in the land business," said Helen Sclair, a
retired schoolteacher who has taught about cemeteries at the Newberry Library and who
wrote the book "Greater Chicagoland Cemeteries." "If they had their
way," Ald. Patrick J. O'Connor (40th) said, "they'd sell everything that
didn't have somebody buried underneath it." Not long after SCI bought Rosehill in
1991, the company began looking to sell parts of the cemetery, O'Connor said. There
was just one problem: Though Rosehill is zoned for single-family residential development,
a covenant that grew out of a 1986 chancery suit involving the cemetery's previous
owner, Potter Palmer IV, restricted parts of Rosehill for use as a church, synagogue!
, school, health-care facility or nursing home. The suit was an attemp
of Rosehill after Palmer had considered selling out to developers who wanted cemetery land
for a Jewel grocery store and then thought about putting a funeral home on cemetery
grounds. Bill George Stotis, an attorney who grew up in the neighborhood and was angered
by the proposed grocery store, represented some of the lot owners pro bono. "When
Potter Palmer bought the cemetery from shareholders in 1981 or '83, it was his goal
and his dream to sell that property to various developers," Stotis said. "The
issue was whether the cemetery, which had never paid real estate taxes on property since
its inception in the 1850s, could turn around and take property that's never been on
the tax rolls and sell if for commercial purposes, giving them an undue advantage over
other commercial landowners." Stotis, who filed the first legal volley in the suit,
contended that lot owners had been given improper notice of proposed development. Soon he
was joined by attorneys for billionaire busine!
ssman Lester Crown and Arthur Rubloff, one of the best-known real estate moguls in
Chicago. Rubloff died soon after joining the suit and was laid to rest in Rosehill not far
from where development was proposed. "My position was, you want to develop the
cemetery, fine. Pay property taxes back to 1859 and then develop it," Stotis said.
Settlement of the suit in 1990 seemingly put an end to what Dan K. Webb, an attorney for
Palmer, called "the apparently eternal [litigation] surrounding the cemetery."
But not everyone was happy. On June 10, 1990, lot owner Albert J. Hatch typed a letter to
Cook County Circuit Judge Albert Green in which Hatch referred to himself as one of the
"future occupants" of Rosehill. Hatch opposed the settlement, saying it
didn't go far enough. "We believe that we lot holders," he wrote, "are
being taken for a mess of gold which will enrich outsiders and impoverish us." But
the effect of the covenant was to discourage buyers for years afterward. This is !
the first time that SCI has had a sales contract on part of the cemete
cast a shadow on the deal, whose contingencies SCI would not disclose. "The potential
buyers are trying to figure out whether it's worth it," O'Connor said.
"They've got a lot to ponder." One tract under contract is restricted by the
covenant, Bolton said. The other is not, because lot owners, assuming it always would
remain cemetery land, didn't think restrictions were necessary. It's that tract
that Concord wants to buy, O'Connor said. Concord officials could not be reached and
did not return phone calls to the company's office in Palatine. The tracts are
contiguous and neither has graves. They lie mostly south of the Bryn Mawr Avenue entrance
along Western Avenue, Bolton said. SCI would not say how big either was, but Bolton said
that both together were more than 22 acres-the size that Sclair said she had heard
mentioned in connection with the sale. Though several of the plaintiffs in the 1986 suit
have died and now occupy space at Rosehill, some of the lot owners who fil!
ed the 1986 case have vowed to fight SCI if it tries to develop the unrestricted land,
O'Connor said. One of the litigants from 1986, Lester Crown, said he has been invited
to meet with Concord officials in the next couple of weeks. "It has been a very
friendly discussion," Crown said. Crown said he had given no thought to fighting
Concord or SCI. But he added: "I hope they don't go ahead. I think it's
important that it remains a cemetery. There's a lot of history behind it. I think it
would be a shame to build anything on the east side of Western Avenue." Hatch's
widow, Helen, agrees. "On Memorial Day, with all the flags flying out there, it's
really something," she said. The Hatch family owns 10 lots in Rosehill. "We
liked Rosehill," Helen Hatch said. "We thought it was very pretty, with all the
trees and the lagoons." Now two of the lots have been used, the first by Helen's
son, who died at age 18 in an automobile accident 10 years ago; and the second by her
husband, Albe!
rt, who died six years ago and was buried in Section 16-well away from
cemetery he fought to preserve with letters like this, written in June 1990: "I
implore the court: In the names of the thousands already interred at Rosehill, and more
thousands to come, stop the desecration before the final irreversible step is taken.
"Thank you."