They went from local coffin makers forced to supplement their income in other ways to highly trained medical professionals, embalming bodies for the “good of public health,” and creating artistic corpse displays for the family. It didn’t hurt that the postwar economic boom gave people the expendable income to keep up with the postmortem Joneses.

Toute cette agitation nocturne prenait un sens. L’agitation des grooms, des chauffeurs de taxis, du maître d’hôtel. Ils faisaient leur métier qui est, en fin de compte, de pousser devant lui ce champagne et cette fille lasse. Bernis regardait la vie par les coulisses où tout est métier. Où il n’y a ni vice, ni vertu, ni émotion trouble, mais un lab

“Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.” That’s a sentence worth reading twice. In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabi