Père Lachaise opened east of central Paris in 1804 as a landscaped burial ground laid out with winding paths, trees and family monuments on a hillside, in response to the closure of the city's overcrowded and unsanitary churchyards. Designed by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, it treated the cemetery as a designed picturesque landscape rather than a bare graveyard. It quickly became a place for the living to walk as well as a place to bury the dead.
The garden cemetery on the urban edge became a prototype for the public park, offering ordered greenery and contemplative space before purpose-built parks existed. It seeded the rural-cemetery movement in Britain and America and helped establish the idea that cities needed designed open space for everyone.
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