Boston Cemetery to be Turned into Parking Lot

The historic Granary Burying Ground in downtown Boston will be turned into a parking lot, National Park Service officials announced Monday. The move will help alleviate Boston's chronic parking shortage.

"Park Street was becoming an oxymoron," Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney noted, referring to the poorly chosen name of the street which the cemetery abuts, "Parking has not been allowed on Park Street for 100 years."

The Boston metropolitan area has 3 million cars but only 1 million parking spaces. In the past, residents solved this problem by triple parking. The new lot, however, is expected to make this unnecessary.

The cemetery, dating back to 1660 and housing 3 declaration of independence signers, will still retain its historic character. Parking spaces will be labeled with the graves of the people they reside upon, and headstones will be recycled as dividers. The site will be administered by the National Parking Service, a rapidly growing division of the National Park Service.

"We intend to preserve the unique character of this site," a National Parking Service spokeswoman said, "For example Sam Adams' grave will always be adorned with a beer bottle or two, and John Hancock's plot will be decorated with the signatures of local graffiti artists. We like to tell tourists, now, not only can you visit Paul Revere's remains, but you can also park your SUV on top of them!"

She also noted that the move was in line with the National Parking Services' philosophy that national treasures should be explorable without leaving one's car. Each parking space will be a "generous" five feet wide, leaving ample room for parkers to climb out their windows.

The decision has drawn fire from local historical preservationists, who believe the paving over of the graveyard will "ruin" it, and from people who oppose parking lots in general. The latter group has suffered from an inability to choose a name to organize under, "anti- parkinglotians" being too much of a mouthful.

Most local residents, however, seemed pleased by the decision. "Histowy, shmystewy," one local said in the local dialect, "Thewe's histowy evewywhere. Show me one place in this city where histowy didn't happen! The weal question is, where am I gonna pawk my caw?" Other locals noted that the Granary residents had managed a real bargain, buying prime land at 1600's prices, and claimed that they had already had "their day in the grass". "John Hancock was a cool guy and all, but he also decomposed into some of the most expensive dirt in America," a Harvard economist noted, "so when's the last time he paid property taxes on that?"

Like most public corporations, the Park Service has been under pressure lately to increase profits, cut costs, and eliminate underperforming units. Former oil magnate and current president George Bush has adopted the policy "Turn a profit or turn into a parking lot" with regard to land administered by the service. Some have speculated that his lack of regard for public land stems from his long tenure in Texas, where most of the land is worthless anyway.

"Sure, we could charge, say, $5 a head to see the cemetery," the Parking Service spokeswoman noted, "but we can charge them $40 an hour to park on it!"

The automotive association AAA, which supports the move, has ranked Boston as the 4th worst place in the world to park a car. Parking in Boston was considered better than parking on the vent of Old Faithful, a melting iceberg, or a monster truck rally, but worse than Baghdad, Iraq, where parked cars are routinely blown up by insurgents who want the parking spaces for themselves.

If the Granary Cemetery lot proves successful, other Boston sites that may be turned into parking lots include the Old North Church, the state legislature building, and Fenway Park.