The 2021 Brooklyn Cemetery project was undertaken by two students in Professor Katherine Melcher's landscape engagement studio at the University of Georgia during the 2021 fall semester. The following entries were written at the mid-point and at the end of the semester to document the project. 

Blog entries and project content were developed by Elyna Grapstein (MLA 2022) and Chris Robey (MLA 2022).

2021 Project Introduction and Early Semester Reflections

Site Context 

Black cemeteries scattered across the United States tell a story of the country’s past cemetery segregation: Unlike many predominantly white cemeteries, which were designed as garden spaces to honor both the dead and the living, Black cemeteries—like the communities they represented—were relegated to the periphery. Many Black Americans excluded from white-owned cemeteries built their own burial spaces. Now, their descendants are working to preserve the grounds, many of them at risk of being lost 

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Brooklyn Cemetery is a case in point. Resting between Clarke Central Middle School and Holy Cross Lutheran Church on an eleven-acre tract, Brooklyn Cemetery (formerly known as the Bethlehem Cemetery) was one of the first African American cemeteries in Athens, Georgia. Established in 1882, the cemetery served as a final resting place for the many Black, working-class residents of the Brooklyn/Hawthorne area who were not allowed to be buried in Athens’ white cemeteries.  

Most of the people buried in Brooklyn Cemetery were born between 1883 and 1901. The women were mostly laundresses, cooks, and servants, while the men were mostly laborers, farmers, janitors or nurses. Additionally, there are also 54 confirmed war veterans buried in the cemetery, who variously served in World Wars I and II, the Korean War and the Civil War, as well as at least three family plots at, some containing the graves of Athens’ first Black educators. In all, nearly 1,000 Black residents of Athens are buried in Brooklyn Cemetery.  

Around the 1980s, the site fell into disrepair. Invasive species and overgrowth laid claim to much of the cemetery. Some tombstones tipped over and disappeared beneath carpets of English ivy; others remain completely unmarked. Like so many Black cemeteries elsewhere, in the U.S., Brooklyn Cemetery lingered precipitously near the edge of being lost.  

In 2006, Brooklyn area native Linda E. Davis and retired Clarke Middle School teacher Karl Scott established the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery with the aim of goal of restoring and preserving the cemetery grounds and commemorating the people buried there. With the help of volunteers from the Athens community and descendants of those interred, the organization has undertaken the hard work of reclaiming and restoring the site by removing trash, woody understory vegetation, and various invasive species as well as identifying and tagging unmarked graves.  

In 2012, University of Georgia Prof. Katherine Melcher’s Landscape Architecture Community and Place Studio, worked with cemetery trustees to develop a master plan for the cemetery, which will help tremendously in the effort to restore and preserve the site. In 2020, another class of graduate students under Professor Melcher’s supervision submitted design proposals to finalize Section G of the cemetery. 

For the Fall 2021 semester, our design team would be focusing on improving upon these design proposals and producing and implementation plan including construction details, specifications, and and preliminary cost projections that the FOBC could use to move forward with making their vision a reality.  

Initial Site Visit with Linda Davis 

Our team had our fist on-site meeting with Linda Davis, our primary contact with the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery, on August 27th. This meeting provided us with an opportunity to learn about the Friends’ needs and constraints for the site, as well as to determine what Linda expected of us during our work with her over the course of the semester. In sum, Linda articulated the following goals: 

1. Finalize an implementable design for Section G of Brooklyn Cemetery that will set a precedent for future development within the cemetery to follow 

2. Create visual continuity throughout the cemetery 

3. Signal to visitors that Brooklyn Cemetery is an active burial site, rather than an abandoned one.  

4. Determine final site for a memorial that would be clearly visible to visitors  

5. Improve upon David Evans’s (MLA ‘21) “figure and coin” memorial concept in order to better convey the importance of families, rather than lone individuals, to surviving 400 years of the continuity of slavery. 
   
   

With this feedback, our team then proceeded to draft a scope of work to guide our work for the semester. We also set a date to return to Brooklyn Cemetery for a more thorough site analysis.  

Site Analysis 

On September 1st, we returned to Brooklyn Cemetery to conduct our fieldwork. Over the course of the morning, we collected waypoints for existing trees, stumps, and marked graves in Section G, as well as at the three proposed memorial site locations that Linda showed us. We also identified and mapped areas of concern regarding stormwater and erosion control and took circulation tracks throughout the rest of Brooklyn Cemetery.  

Having collected this data, we then compiled it into an ArcMap Pro document and undertook some preliminary mapping to better see how the various site elements and problem areas related to one another on the site. This cursory mapping exercise helped us to better understand some of the root causes of the erosion and drainage issues – for example, after overlaying our site data with historic aerial imagery depicting Brooklyn Cemetery in the late 1950s and 60s, we could see that many of the existing stormwater channels were in fact old roadbeds that had since faded into the landscape. One of these swales ended up being the main outlet for the conveyance system we would eventually propose.  

On subsequent site visits, we also brought along a contractor’s wheel and DBH tape to get the linear-foot measurements of the existing road system as well as average road widths. These measurements would become important later on as we began to develop more specific details, specifications, and cost projections. Most importantly, however, the areas of concern identified during this fieldwork helped the design team prioritize their work for the semester and provided additional insight critical to finalizing our scope statement.  

Scoping 

Having gathered preliminary feedback from our primary stakeholder as well as some baseline site data, we proceeded to draft our scope of work for the semester. The purpose of the scope statement would be to set appropriate guardrails for the project. We are a team of two, and there is much to be done, so we had to be strategic about what we focused on so as to make best use of everyone’s time, best leverage our individual strengths, and deliver a quality final product that didn’t try to be too many things at once. We didn’t want to stretch ourselves too thin. 

The key deliverables we outlined in this scope statement were as follows: 

• (1) Select one reinterment site among the three options designated within Section G 

• (2) Improve upon David’s design per the Trustees’ requests.  

• Specifically, rework the design to include a family and speak to “400 years of the continuity of slavery.” 

• Provide detailed information concerning copyrights and consider ways in which a copyright on the design might be leveraged to provide funding for ongoing maintenance. 

• (3) Develop a visualization of the final memorial design that is shareable with stakeholders.   

• (4) Develop usable construction and management documents, including:    

• Site preparation specifications 

• Construction details and specifications 

• Phased circulation plan  

• Strategic implementation plan built around the design vision, mission, goals, and objectives 

• Management and maintenance recommendations  

• (5) Establish design guidelines for elements added that provide guidance on maintaining aesthetic coherency throughout the cemetery 

By September 3rd, we had submitted our draft scope of work to Linda and Professor Melcher for final approval. We then presented the finalized scope of work during the FOBC’s monthly meeting on Zoom in order to keep them up-to-date on our progress.  

Development of Alternatives  

From this point on, the design team proceeded to develop design alternatives for roads, trails, gravestones, conveyance systems, spot treatments for erosion and stormwater management issues, and a finalized memorial design. The idea of this phase was to provide stakeholders with several options to choose from so that they may vote on a preferred alternative for the design team to proceed with finalizing.  

“Town Hall "Presentation and Survey Administration (held October 8th) 

The design team met with Linda and a small group of Friends at […] Church on October 8th to give an in-person presentation of their proposed design alternatives. Linda issued a call for as many Trustees and Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery to participate as possible. Those present were able to provide direct feedback after the presentation, as well as the opportunity to discuss alternatives openly. The design team directed those present as well as those who were not able to attend in-person to (1) review the video recording of the presentation and (2) take an online Google Forms survey by which they may express their preferences for the design alternatives presented.   

End of Semester Reflections

Our team has made significant progress since our mid-October presentation to the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery members and Trustees. At the end of the meeting, we distributed an online survey to our stakeholders to give them an opportunity to share their ideas and critiques of the design alternatives we presented to them. Their survey submissions were very informative to our team. With a total of seven respondents, the survey results were closely tied for many of the design-related topics, especially when it came to stating preferences for the design of the memorial. These quantitative results were supplemented by two discussions that our team had with our stakeholders. One of the discussions occurred at the end of our October presentation, and then we received more feedback and direction from the Friends at our follow-up Zoom meeting in November, which allowed us the chance to discuss the survey results with some of the survey respondents. These conversations were invaluable, providing the depth and dialogue we needed to push our design work forward while ensuring that we were meeting the needs and vision of our stakeholders. Moreover, these conversations served as important exercises in active listening, allowing us a chance to cultivate a crucial design skill in empathy and communication.  

The survey results and these informal conversations helped us determine a path forward on a few of the design alternatives we had presented to our stakeholders. For example, there was a clear preference for compacted gravel surfaces on the roads and trails circulation system. Other proposed items, such as the design for the memorial, left us with a little more of a gray area. Every survey respondent seemed to prefer a different memorial alternative that our team presented, leaving us with the challenge of combining elements from each of our alternatives into a single, unified design. Conceptualizing the memorial was particularly challenging as we needed to figure out a design that was tasteful, met the stakeholder vision, and would additionally be able to rest on the landscape with minimal drainage issues and pose limited impact to the landscape. Additionally, our team had spent the semester brainstorming memorial concepts under the impression that the columbarium and the memorial would co-occur on the landscape. It wasn’t until a stakeholder meeting in late October that we learned the Friends had never intended to place these items together.   

The thought of separating the memorial from the columbarium was disquieting to our team for several reasons: we had previously presented graphics to the FOBC Trustees that displayed both elements together; the 2020 MLA Student Team had also presented the two elements together; and grouping the memorial with the columbarium seems like a sensible design choice. This ultimately left our design team with a difficult decision regarding how to best proceed forward, but it also provided us with an important lesson about understanding client vision and design compromise. After deliberating as a team, we concluded that we would continue to showcase the memorial with the columbarium together and propose they co-occur in Section G of Brooklyn Cemetery. We feel strongly that the two features complement each other, and when presented together, strengthen the message of economic freedom put forth by the memorial concept. We intend to spend time communicating this to the attendees of our final presentation on December 13th and hopefully make a compelling argument to keep these features together. Of course, we did not want to thrust our vision upon our stakeholders, and we additionally proceeded to draft construction details for the columbarium and the memorial separately in the event that the FOBC Trustees choose to separate these two elements. In summary, we have chosen to present what we feel is the best design decision, while additionally providing our stakeholders with the toolkit they would need to build the memorial and the columbarium separately if they so choose.  

Now, as we wrap up the semester and prepare to piece together the final version of our team’s Implementation Plan, we are taking the time to reflect on this experience. We have learned valuable lessons about the importance of clear communication between stakeholders and designers, the need for active listening and empathy in community design, and the level of sensitivity needed when taking on a project that has complicated ties to social injustices like slavery and racial inequality.