Massive cooling flow clusters inhabit crowded environments

With the availability of large-scale redshift survey data, it is now becomi ng possible to explore correlations between large-scale structure and the p roperties and morphologies of galaxy clusters. We investigate the spatial d istributions of a 98% complete, volume-limited Sample of nearby (z < 0.1) A bell clusters with well-determined redshifts and find that cooling flow clu sters with high mass accretion rates have nearest neighbors which are much closer than those of other clusters in the sample (at the 99.8% confidence level) and reside in more crowded environments out to 60 h-(1)(50) Mpc. Sev eral possible explanations of this effect are discussed.