Since we’re now in the heart of spooky season, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone that there are thousands of dead bodies buried under Manhattan. They’re primarily remains from potter’s fields, or graveyards for the poor who couldn’t afford burials in private cemeteries.
As New York grew rapidly in the 19th century, Manhattan was quickly running out of space to bury its dead. By 1851, the city had forbidden burials south of 86th Street and the creation of any new cemeteries on the island, leading to the development of the Cemetery Belt along the Brooklyn-Queens border. (In Queens today, the dead outnumber the living by more than two to one.)
When Manhattan cemeteries became overcrowded, people of means were able to relocate loved ones to more out-of-the-way plots, while “marginalized and impoverished people saw their burial spaces—often informally established in undesirable places—obliterated and claimed for development, only to be rediscovered later,” as Allison Meier writes in Urban Omnibus. For example:
Washington Square Park
According to a 2005 archaeological assessment of Washington Square Park, as many as 20,000 corpses were buried there—and most were never disinterred. From 1797 to 1826, it was a potter’s field, mainly for victims of Yellow Fever, as well as enslaved and indigenous peoples. Gallows, where criminal executions were held until 1820, stood where the fountain is today. In the early 1800s, when the site was close to reaching its capacity as a burial ground, Mayor Philip Hone decided he wanted to turn the area into a public square. By 1832, New York University was already purchasing land and raising property values. In 2015, while trying to update water mains under the park, city workers uncovered two burial vaults filled with wooden coffins and skeletons just 3.5 feet underground.
African Burial Ground
In 1991, construction workers building a federal office in Lower Manhattan discovered graves 24 feet below ground, and eventually uncovered the remains of 419 bodies. As it turned out, from the 1690s to 1794, the site was the largest colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans in North America, and held an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 bodies. (Enslaved Africans made up as much as 20 percent of colonial New York’s population.) In 1788, a group of freedmen unsuccessfully petitioned the City Council to stop medical students from digging up bodies to use as cadavers. After the burial ground was discovered, the government only agreed to stop construction and reconfigure the site after large-scale protests. In 2006, President Bush designated the African Burial Ground a National Monument.
African Burial Ground, late 1700s
Madison Square Park
This plot of land served as a final resting place for patients from from Bellevue Hospital, newly established to treat yellow fever in the late 18th century. According to anthropologist Mary French and her comprehensive New York Cemetery Project, the site was used as a burial ground for only three years, before the potter’s field was created in Washington Square Park. Hundreds were likely buried there, and some of the bodies were disinterred in the early 19th century, when the federal government was building a gunpowder magazine. In 1930, plumbers uncovered a skeleton during excavations for a sewer.
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New York’s present-day potter’s field, Hart Island, was the subject of news headlines this spring, after an Associated Press drone captured footage of workers digging mass graves there for coronavirus victims. This mile-long strip of land off the coast of the the Bronx holds the remains of 1 million people: Civil War veterans, stillborn children, AIDs victims, those too poor for a private burial, and those otherwise unknown or unclaimed. The city has used the island as a burial site since 1869, and has relied on prison labor (paid $1 an hour) until recently, hiring contract workers during the pandemic. As Jody Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine in April:
“Hart Island is the domain of the dispossessed, where the poorest and most marginalized citizens are laid to rest in unmarked graves by a work force drawn from the country’s second-largest jail system. Now more New Yorkers, more Americans, are compelled to notice these margins—to confront the possibility that the great gaping chasm separating the fortunate from the wretched may open wide enough to swallow many, many more of us.”
Spooky indeed.
1.6 million
Square feet of NYC office space snapped up by Amazon, Facebook, and Apple since the start of 2020, mostly leased or purchased since the start of the pandemic. Along with Google, these companies now have enough office space to hire another 15,000 employees in New York.
Around town…
-Fracking? In Brooklyn? Protestors shut down two construction sites for a new National Grid pipeline that will run from Brownsville to Greenpoint: “I don’t want people in my neighborhood to suffer from cancer.” (AM NY)
-The NYPD is forming an Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, its first-ever task force focused on crimes targeting a single race: “What he hadn’t foreseen was the reluctance of some victims to cooperate with authorities—some driven by fear of law enforcement, others by a lack of English proficiency, and still more who worried about their troubles going public.” (WSJ)
-New York is America’s third rattiest city, behind Chicago (#1 for six years running) and L.A. (NY Post)