The City Built on Its Dead: New York's Buried Grounds
Long before the parks and cemeteries you can visit today, these four grounds held the city's dead by the thousand: a Village square over a potter's field, an East Village memorial to one catastrophic morning, Brooklyn's great Victorian necropolis, and an island of more than a million graves. New York, it turns out, is built on its dead.
Map the Four Grounds
Washington Square Park: 20,000 Beneath the Arch
The chess players and street musicians share their ground with the dead. From the 1790s the square served as a potter's field, and an estimated 20,000 bodies still lie beneath the park; remains still surface during construction. In the northwest corner stands the Hangman's Elm, more than three centuries old and long tied, by legend, to public executions. The marble arch went up much later, in 1892, over the quiet crowd below.
Tompkins Square Park: The Slocum Dead
A small marble fountain here remembers the worst day in New York before September 11. On June 15, 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire on the East River, and more than a thousand people died, most of them women and children from the German immigrant neighborhood that once surrounded this park. The disaster emptied Kleindeutschland almost overnight. The fountain, carved with a mourning figure, is easy to walk past and hard to forget.
Green-Wood Cemetery: Brooklyn's City of the Dead
Opened in 1838 as a garden for the living to wander among the dead, Green-Wood now holds some 570,000 graves across 478 rolling acres. Its highest point, Battle Hill, saw the bloodiest fighting of the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, and the Revolutionary dead are said to linger there still. Wild green parakeets nest in the Gothic gate. It is beautiful, and it is a necropolis the size of a small town.
Hart Island: A Million Graves Offshore
Off the Bronx shore lies the largest public cemetery in the country. Since 1869, more than a million New Yorkers have been buried on Hart Island, in long trenches once dug by Rikers Island inmates, the unclaimed and the unnamed laid in plain pine. For most of its history the island was closed to the public; only recently have ranger-guided visits reopened it. It is the quiet, final answer to a city built on its dead.
