Evergreen Cemetery, Memorial cemetery in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, US

Evergreen Cemetery is a memorial ground in Boyle Heights that covers a large area with more than 300,000 burial sites. The grounds contain numerous historical monuments and different memorial sections spread throughout the property.

Evergreen was established on August 23, 1877, and is the oldest surviving cemetery in Los Angeles, with over 300,000 interments. In return for a zoning variance, its founders gave the city a 9-acre parcel as an indigent graveyard, the potter's field, which the county took over in 1917 and exhausted by 1924. Evergreen bought most of that land back in 1964 and covered it with 8 feet of compacted soil.

Each year during the Obon festival, Japanese American families gather at the cemetery to clean their relatives' tombstones and visit the spirits. The Garden of the Pines section serves as a memorial to Japanese Issei pioneers, and in 1949 a memorial to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was added for the Japanese American soldiers who fell in World War II.

The cemetery lies in Boyle Heights, with the section near 1st and Lorena streets once a potter's field; the county crematorium still stands at that corner. The Chinese Shrine, purchased and restored by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in 1992, is a registered historic monument. Families gather during the Obon festival each year to clean relatives' tombstones and visit the spirits.

In 2005, Metro workers widening First Street uncovered the remains of 174 people, mostly Asian men, with rice bowls, jade bracelets and opium pipes; archaeologists identified the spot as the Chinese section of the old potter's field. The remains were reburied near the Chinese Shrine, and a memorial was dedicated on March 7, 2010.