In the 1870s, George François Mugnier and Samuel T. Blessing photographed St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, providing evocative images of grand architectural monuments in a crowded landscape.

Tombscape Views

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the cemetery had become increasingly urban as the ground cover present in Latrobe's 1834 watercolor gave way to rapid development of the cemetery accompanying the epidemics of the mid to late nineteenth century. The loss of the cemetery's pastoral quality led to an increased allocation of the purchased tomb area to be used to endow the tomb with its own landscape setting, often distilled to the symbolic placement of a few plants, a shrub, or even plant cuttings attached to the tomb itself.

The memorial function of the cemetery's tombscape gives it a context of a unique character, reflecting an approach to design that, in addition to its practical functions, seeks to order the incomprehensible phenomenon of death. The reasoned application of classical decorative modes and orthogonal path planning has become disoriented, resulting in the tombscape, a dynamic jumble of form, space, and context. The east facade of the Italian Society Tomb and the Conti Alley Tombscape are examples showing the variety in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 tombscapes in past and current images. Also, see Alley 9L Tombscape restoration work.