The Fairview Mausoleum

A grand building once stood near here, a grand building. It was the Fairview Mausoleum, opened in the early twentieth century. Inside were its own chapel, its own crematory, and long corridors of crypts, a place meant to keep the dead in dignity for all time.

It did not last. The mausoleum went bankrupt, and over the decades that followed it slowly fell apart, abandoned and crumbling in a residential neighborhood beside a high school. Eventually it was condemned.

Then came the difficult work of moving the human remains out of the failing building and reburying them at Graceland Cemetery. A fire station now stands on part of the old site, and a pair of stone pillars marks where the dead were finally laid to rest.