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Dorchester North Burying Ground (1633) is one of America’s oldest cemeteries -- a rare treasure in Uphams Corner’s central commercial district.  As Adelina from Upham’s Corner Health Center describes, “that beautiful cemetery does need so much attention… I drive by it and think often how fragile and yet so beautiful right in the middle of Uphams Corner.”  Although publically owned and maintained by Boston’s Parks and Recreation Department, DNBG is not open for the community to wander in on a sunny afternoon and explore the many stories of the past, whispered through each intricate headstone carving.  OPEN UPHAMS believes that these stories deserve to be shared with the community in an easily accessible, graphically beautiful way. 

On Saturday, August 17th, OPEN UPHAMS has been invited by Nancy Conrad of Uphams Corner News Online to conduct tours of DNBG during the Uphams Corner Street Festival.  OPEN UPHAMS’ tours will consist of:

·         OPEN UPHAMS / Past - An online program guide, easily accessible on a mobile smart phone for use prior, during, and after the tours.  This will include a graphically engaging map of the burial ground with points of interest, personal stories, and associated historic imagery that will be accessed, in part, via headstone image recognition technology (i.e. kooaba). 

·         OPEN UPHAMS / Present – An online memorial guide that enables DNBG to also serve as a destination for remembrance and celebration of contemporary community figures from Upham’s Corner that have recently passed.  These memorials will be accessed via image recognition technology of small chairs, scattered around DNBG during the tours.  One small chair/bench will be made in honor of each individual representing a sort of contemporary headstone. 

·         A library of Past and Present memorial stories, maps, and associated imagery will reside on openuphams.org and made available before, during, and after the Uphams Corner Street Festival.  For those without a mobile smart phone, broadsheet newsprint program guides will be available for the tour.

OPEN UPHAMS hopes to use DNBG as a community platform that unites Upham’s Corners myriad cultures – Cape Verdean, Haitian, African American, Dominican, and Vietnamese – as well as diverse generational and socioeconomic groups by revealing unknown commonalities and celebrating cherished uniqueness through stories of the neighborhood’s past and present.

  Submitted by Beth Lundell Garver / Mixed Reality City / 05 April 2013

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DNBG demo

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DNBG demo

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DNBG demo

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DNBG demo

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demo

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demo

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Demo of DNBG Game of Life

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Demo for my Mixed-Reality studio class.

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After departing from the JFK/UMass T stop, I walked for what felt like a mile, but was closer to half that.  Columbia Road, formally called Boston Street, was my path.  It was loud with automotive cacophony.  Cold.  Dismal, at times.  In search of a public space saturated with stories, I discovered much more.  But this, I tell you, did not happen with ease.

I found the subject of my experiment in the commercial center of Upham’s Corner in Dorchester, Boston.  Its neighbors: Payless Shoes, Aaron’s rent-to-own furniture store, Dublin House pub, CVS, Consuela’s Beauty Salon, Ruth Darling Childcare Center, Atco Supply, and Boston Spanish SDA Church, to name only a few.  A MBTA bus stop warms the west edge of the space, where people wait and occasionally remember to look inside and inhabit the place with their memory.

My data set records created voids, clearances, and areas of free play between a defined public sacredness and aged urbanity.  In Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau proposes that a discourse which “makes people believe, is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises.  Far from expressing a void or describing a lack, it creates such.  It makes room for a void, in that way it opens up clearings; it ‘allows’ a certain play within a system of defined spaces.  It ‘authorized’ the production of an area of free play on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities.  It makes places habitable.” 

With Certeau's words in mind, the public space of my experiment hosts a unique collection of credible things, memorable things, and diverse inhabitants.  Here, rivals rest “side by side on the same low level,” and “those that divided the world by their contests and disputes” find humility and peace (1).  I see all sorts of storied people: a printer, student, lawyer, judge, wife, child, servant, immigrant, revolutionary, radical… and yet, I hypothesize that this public space is invisible to the real world, like a ghost.  Severed from reality and contemporary relevance, while its voids remain latent for good use.

My methods are multi-variegated, utilizing photography, sketches, historic records, and smart phone geo-tracking.  And although my collection is admittedly incomplete, I believe it is the beginning of something meaningful.  Through this experiment, I aim to mix realities between living/dead, seen/unseen, and fixed/flexible.  My objective is to assemble a data set of voids in hopes of prompting community cultivation for new public space pioneering within my subject place that is Dorchester North Burying Ground, established in 1634.

  NOTES:

(1) Daniel Davenport, Sexton’s Monitor and Dorchester Cemetery Memorial, 1845.

(2) The word “sexton” is derived from the Medieval Latin sacristanus meaning “custodian of sacred objects.”