Richmond BizSense has an article on Hollywood Cemetery’s new businesses:
Excerpts:
RVA Gem Car Tours recently began selling private tours of Hollywood Cemetery on six-person electric carts.
Owner Buck Ward said the venture, which launched in May, is a spin-off of his other businesses Segway of Richmond, which launched in 2008, and RVA Trolley, which got rolling in 2012.
Ward said the cemetery tour business is in keeping with his mission of letting people experience Richmond in different ways. He said the carts cater to groups too big for a Segway tour but too small to rent out a trolley.
“This is another way to see and discover Richmond,” Ward said. “It’s more geared toward private tours.”
RVA Gem Car Tours has three Polaris GEM cars in its fleet. Ward said they cost about $20,000 apiece – the price includes the cost to install solar panels on each vehicle. The cars are street legal and can go as fast as 24 miles per hour.
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On the virtual side of things, the nonprofit Friends of Hollywood Cemetery launched an interactive website in July that lets users take virtual tours of the burial ground.
The group enlisted local ad firm Addison Clark, the agency of record for the cemetery.
Jeff Allen, managing partner at Addison Clark, said the new site caters to the two segments Hollywood Cemetery serves: tourists and plot seekers.
“Hollywood Cemetery is a very unique entity,” Allen said. “Everyone thinks of them as an outdoor museum. Not a lot of folks know that they are an open, functioning cemetery. Those that do know assume they are cost prohibitive or for old Richmond elite.”
Over the course of about six months, Addison Clark and HostRVA, formerly NimblePitch, built a digitized map of Hollywood Cemetery and overlaid it with GPS coordinates. They then focused on compiling online reference materials and integrating them with points of interest on the digital map.
The website can be used both by on-site visitors looking for interactive, self-guided tours and by remote desktop users curious about the cemetery.