A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
From the Post:
Cemeteries belong to citizens, not 'owners'
'The Mount Pleasant Group is built on our ancestors' donation of $1 per family'
Ann Berkeley, National Post
Published: Wednesday, May 31, 2006
It's a shame Mount Pleasant Cemetery's proposed 24,000-square-foot visitation centre -- with its 82-car parking lot -- has caused so much bad feeling. Activists are delving into archives to see whether they can stop the desecration. Save our Greenspace signs are popping up all over; many are signing a petition.
I think the Necropolis, Mount Pleasant and Prospect Cemeteries belong to Torontonians, not to the guys running them, and I've followed the money trail to show it.
Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries writes its organization began in 1826 when the Town of York's (later Toronto) population of 1,700 had nowhere to bury those not belonging to the two dominant religions.
Confronting this problem, local bigwigs including William Lyon Mackenzie and John Beverley Robinson met in a Masonic lodge over what's now a downtown pub and undertook to set up a public subscription to create a potters field and non-sectarian cemetery.
No family could contribute more than the equivalent of a dollar (sterling back then) "... to ensure that no person or group could claim a proprietary interest." Actually, they came up short and several trustees kicked in money, later repaid from cemetery earnings. The Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada passed a statute establishing the Trustees of the Toronto General Burying Grounds.
The money was put in trust. The four trustees were to have no business interest in the cemetery. They bought property in the Village of Yorkville north of the town limits but citizens petitioned against having a burial ground so they had to sell, buying instead the religiously affiliated Necropolis, which soon became a public cemetery. It took years to move the bodies there.
Then they bought land south of the graveyard and started burials, only to have the locals object again. The trustees had to sell the land back to the city. It's now Riverdale Farm.
In 1871, they incorporated themselves as a non-share capital corporation with sweeping powers to create and change bylaws pertaining to the cemeteries and to pay no taxes.
With what little they had, they acquired land further north which, in 1876, opened as Mount Pleasant Cemetery. It had orchards to the south and a pond in what is now the cemetery's Vale of Avoca and grew so popular that it expanded eastward.
With the income from the graveyards, the trustees bought Prospect Cemetery. As the city grew, so did its need for cemeteries. All in the Mount Pleasant Group are built on our ancestors' initial donation of $1 per family and the trustees' good governance.
Although it is still a non-profit corporation, and has no owners, Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries now says these grounds are private, that they run commercial operations. They no longer have trustees but a chief executive officer (Norris Zucchet, one-time head of the Toronto Parking Authority) and a board of directors about whom they are very secretive. At least three of them are gung-ho for this visitation centre (a.k.a. funeral home without embalming facilities), which, incidentally will compete for business with taxpaying funeral homes.
Public accountability is down in black and white in a Mount Pleasant Cemetery document dated Oct. 3, 1876, in which Trustee W. F. McMaster wrote, "By the order of the Trustees," (note the use of the word "trustees"), "Mount Pleasant is therefore the property of the citizens and its affairs are managed by a Board of Trustees chosen according to law, who have no private interests whatsoever in the trust..." (his italics).
After no changes in bylaws for years, the group recently submitted new ones for approval to the Ontario Ministry of Government Services, Cemeteries Regulation Unit.
True to form, they have been secretive, posting discreet signs at only three of Mount Pleasant Cemetery's six gates and allowing everyone only this month to see and protest them. The bylaws, if rubber-stamped, will enable them to build, add to an existing structure, diminish the burial space, reroute or abolish an existing right of way, destroy grave vegetation without warning the "rights holder," and then send the family a bill.
Have we lost the plot or have they?
- Toronto writer, broadcaster and communications consultant Ann Berkeley is a neighbour of Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
AoD
Cemeteries belong to citizens, not 'owners'
'The Mount Pleasant Group is built on our ancestors' donation of $1 per family'
Ann Berkeley, National Post
Published: Wednesday, May 31, 2006
It's a shame Mount Pleasant Cemetery's proposed 24,000-square-foot visitation centre -- with its 82-car parking lot -- has caused so much bad feeling. Activists are delving into archives to see whether they can stop the desecration. Save our Greenspace signs are popping up all over; many are signing a petition.
I think the Necropolis, Mount Pleasant and Prospect Cemeteries belong to Torontonians, not to the guys running them, and I've followed the money trail to show it.
Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries writes its organization began in 1826 when the Town of York's (later Toronto) population of 1,700 had nowhere to bury those not belonging to the two dominant religions.
Confronting this problem, local bigwigs including William Lyon Mackenzie and John Beverley Robinson met in a Masonic lodge over what's now a downtown pub and undertook to set up a public subscription to create a potters field and non-sectarian cemetery.
No family could contribute more than the equivalent of a dollar (sterling back then) "... to ensure that no person or group could claim a proprietary interest." Actually, they came up short and several trustees kicked in money, later repaid from cemetery earnings. The Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada passed a statute establishing the Trustees of the Toronto General Burying Grounds.
The money was put in trust. The four trustees were to have no business interest in the cemetery. They bought property in the Village of Yorkville north of the town limits but citizens petitioned against having a burial ground so they had to sell, buying instead the religiously affiliated Necropolis, which soon became a public cemetery. It took years to move the bodies there.
Then they bought land south of the graveyard and started burials, only to have the locals object again. The trustees had to sell the land back to the city. It's now Riverdale Farm.
In 1871, they incorporated themselves as a non-share capital corporation with sweeping powers to create and change bylaws pertaining to the cemeteries and to pay no taxes.
With what little they had, they acquired land further north which, in 1876, opened as Mount Pleasant Cemetery. It had orchards to the south and a pond in what is now the cemetery's Vale of Avoca and grew so popular that it expanded eastward.
With the income from the graveyards, the trustees bought Prospect Cemetery. As the city grew, so did its need for cemeteries. All in the Mount Pleasant Group are built on our ancestors' initial donation of $1 per family and the trustees' good governance.
Although it is still a non-profit corporation, and has no owners, Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries now says these grounds are private, that they run commercial operations. They no longer have trustees but a chief executive officer (Norris Zucchet, one-time head of the Toronto Parking Authority) and a board of directors about whom they are very secretive. At least three of them are gung-ho for this visitation centre (a.k.a. funeral home without embalming facilities), which, incidentally will compete for business with taxpaying funeral homes.
Public accountability is down in black and white in a Mount Pleasant Cemetery document dated Oct. 3, 1876, in which Trustee W. F. McMaster wrote, "By the order of the Trustees," (note the use of the word "trustees"), "Mount Pleasant is therefore the property of the citizens and its affairs are managed by a Board of Trustees chosen according to law, who have no private interests whatsoever in the trust..." (his italics).
After no changes in bylaws for years, the group recently submitted new ones for approval to the Ontario Ministry of Government Services, Cemeteries Regulation Unit.
True to form, they have been secretive, posting discreet signs at only three of Mount Pleasant Cemetery's six gates and allowing everyone only this month to see and protest them. The bylaws, if rubber-stamped, will enable them to build, add to an existing structure, diminish the burial space, reroute or abolish an existing right of way, destroy grave vegetation without warning the "rights holder," and then send the family a bill.
Have we lost the plot or have they?
- Toronto writer, broadcaster and communications consultant Ann Berkeley is a neighbour of Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
AoD
