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A PRELIMINARY DETERMINATION OF ELIGIBILITY The history and significance of the administration building is inextricably linked to the history and significance of Sunset Memorial Park. Hence, the building must be evaluated in the context of the cemetery as a whole. The Memorial Park: Historical Context The design of cemeteries, like other types of properties, has evolved over time in response to changes in social customs, aesthetic preferences, and technological advancements. Sunset Memorial Park was established in 1927, the fust Midwestern example of a memorial park, a cemetery design that emerged in the early twentieth century. Predecessors to the memorial park were the picturesque mid-nineteenth-century"rural"cemeteries, such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the mid-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century"lawn-park" cemeteries, locally exemplified by late nineteenth-century sections of Lakewood in Minneapolis. Both reflected the ascendancy of secular,privately owned,professionally designed and managed cemeteries over family plots and churchyards.' Memorial parks began appearing in the early twentieth century. They represented not only a new landscape aesthetic but also a major shift in America's attitudes towards death and the rituals surrounding it. As one historian observed: The twentieth-century cemetery was renamed the memorial park by founders who wished to obscure the morbid connotations they believed the public perceived in the word cemetery. The memorial park was simpler and more accessible than the lawn-park cemetery. Society no longer desired a mysterious relationship with the grave. Customers wanted the cemetery to be comfortable and familiar, reflecting mainstream American practices such as the acceptance of the hospital as the place to die, the removal of the funeral from the home, and the purchase of the cemetery lot preneed as a simple business transaction. Thus, cemetery designers freely used the elements of the increasingly popular suburban landscape in developing the look and atmosphere of the memorial park.2 Unlike earlier cemeteries, where tall monuments regularly punctuated the landscape, memorial parks featured landmark monuments surrounded by a lawn with headstones set flush in the ground. Pinelawn Cemetery on Long Island, a memorial park designed by the prominent landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr. in 1902, was a trendsetter for cemetery and landscape professionals. The memorial park that captured the attention of the American public, however, was Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, which entrepreneur Hubert Eaton rescued from failure and 'David Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991),2-5;Howard Colvin,Architecture and the After-Life(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 368-373;Mame Osteen,Haven in the Heart of the City: The History of Lakewood Cemetery(Minneapolis: Lakewood Cemetery, 1992),44. 2 Sloan,Last Great Necessity,2. Sunset Memorial Park Administration Building Preliminary National Register and Condition Assessment Page 2