Evergreen Memorial Park & Crematory is a cemetery in the East Side neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California. Evergreen has several prominent individuals of historical Southern California on its grounds. Many pioneers are interred here, names such as Bixby, Coulter, Hollenbeck, Lankershim, Van Nuys, and Workman. There are politicians, notably former Mayors of Los Angeles. The Garden of the Pines section of the cemetery is a memorial to Japanese Issei pioneers. History Established on August 23, 1877, Evergreen is the oldest, and one of the largest, extant cemeteries in the city with over 300,000 interments. The section near 1st and Lorena streets was at one time a potter's field. Evergreen is notable for never having banned African-Americans from being buried at the cemetery. It has sections for Armenians, Japanese, and early white settlers, and a large section of Mexican graves. Burials Although Evergreen had established burial sites for different ethnicities, they were still segregated from one another. First-generation Japanese, called Issei, had established a burial site on the grounds. In 1949, a memorial for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was incorporated and remembered for the Japanese-American soldiers who had fallen during World War II. Every year during the Obon festival, families gather to keep up their relatives' tombstones and to visit the spirits. Biddy Mason, nurse and philanthropist, was one of the well known figures to be buried at the cemetery, in 1891. There is a section called the “Showmen’s Rest” in which 400 carnival workers and circus performers are buried by a memorial that is decorated with a lion. It was established by the Pacific Coast Showmen’s Association in 1922. One presumed serial killer, Bertha Bielstein, at one time lay in Evergreen Cemetery; however she was buried under another name, Olga Miller. Bielstein came from an upper middle class family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was suspected of killing her parents in their home and moving to Los Angeles after escaping from a mental institution. Later her identity was confirmed and her body was relocated back east. Potter's field In return for a zoning variance to permit the cemetery, the founders of Evergreen gave the City of Los Angeles a parcel of the proposed cemetery in 1877 for use as an indigent graveyard, often referred as a "Potter's field." Ownership of the indigent cemetery passed from the City to the County of Los Angeles in 1917. At the time,