Finding space in New York City’s cemeteries

It was a sunny morning last July when I journeyed to New York’s island of the dead.

After taking the 6 train all the way to its terminus at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, with weekday commuters thinning at each stop‚ my friend and I caught the bus to City Island. From that small landmass, which feels more like a slice of maritime Maine than New York City, we boarded the ferry that would transport us past the bobbing sailboats and over the Gotham equivalent of the River Styx, the Long Island Sound.

Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field for the unclaimed, the stillborn, and poor since 1869, is run by the Department of Correction (the gravediggers are inmates at Rikers Island), so access involves higher security than most cemeteries. All “contraband”—including phones, cameras, and other electronic devices—is checked at the ferry terminal in a lock box. Our guide for the visit enthusiastically pointed out the nearby heap of bedrock known as Rat Island, the osprey’s nest by the dock, and the old brick architecture from Hart Island’s past. Still, there was no ignoring his officer uniform, or the fact that the place we were visiting is where, for decades, the marginalized dead have been forgotten.

Photo by NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Which is what made its natural beauty so surprising. Because we had joined one of the monthly public visits, we could only see the island from a gazebo circled by a bucolic white fence, not far from the ferry dock. Although soundtracked by the eerie noises of machines clearing areas for burial, and the distant ricochet of the police firing range in Pelham Bay Park, it was serene. A sprawl of meadow rolled out on all sides, up to the trees that loomed over the surviving architecture. The tallest of these structures is the crumbling brick smokestack from a disused power plant that fueled a series of institutions considered undesirable enough to be isolated on an island—reformatories, an asylum, a rehabilitation facility.

The most beautiful is the chapel, its shattered rose window just visible between the branches. (According to Kingston Lounge, it was built in the 1930s.) Birds and insects flitted about the untamed environment. If I disregarded the tombstone-shaped granite memorial before us, where visitors are invited to leave mementos below the carved Beatitude “Blessed Are the Poor In Spirit For Theirs Is The Kingdom of Heaven,” as well as the white pipes in the distance dotting the ground to mark a trench of layered coffins, I would believe this was a park.

And maybe it could be—or, at least, a more visible space in the city. Recently, a bill was introduced in the City Council to transfer the potter’s field to the Parks Department (a similar proposal in 2016 was rejected). For years, the Hart Island Project, led by Melinda Hunt, has advocated for better access, as well as unconventional ideas such as reimagining the landmass as a site for green burial. With the news this spring about Hart Island’s shore erosion unearthing bones, it is as timely as ever to reconsider its role in the city, including as a publicly engaged space.

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Cemeteries have long served as urban escapes for New Yorkers, both living and dead. By the 19th century, the churchyards in Manhattan were overcrowded, and outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera raised anxiety about the health impacts of these festering burial grounds. In 1822, 52 casks of quicklime were reportedly dumped in Trinity Churchyard at Wall Street and Broadway to combat the offensive smell, while the fear of grave robbing for medical dissection—which sparked the 1788 Doctor’s Riot—fueled the desire for more secure and peaceful places to mourn. City planners looked to the glacial ridge of Brooklyn and the farmland of the Bronx, imagining cemeteries that would celebrate the cycles of nature while honoring the end of life.

In 1871, a few years after Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx was established, the Evening Post marveled at its rustic cottage-style office and ravine “left in its natural state of wild loveliness, through the midst of which a tumbling brook finds its way to a little lake.” Comptroller J. A. Perry declared of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, founded in 1838: “Beneath the verdant and flowery sod—beneath green and waving foliage—amid tranquil shades, where Nature weeps in all her dews, and sighs in every breeze, and chants a requiem by each warbling bird—the dying generations of this great metropolis will henceforth be sepulchred.”

Visitors were encouraged to experience these new rural cemeteries for respectful recreation as well as funerals. If you wander Green-Wood today, you can still spot the 19th-century horse-shaped hitches where people would stop their carriage tours to rest among the trees. In an 1874 article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the “chief of all the diggers” William Scrimgeour tells a reporter, “You will be surprised, perhaps, but it is nevertheless true, that there are a great many very respectable youthful couples who come here, to a graveyard, to do at least some of their courting.”

Before moving to New York in 2009, I’d mainly visited cemeteries for funerals, and even then rarely as my family, like so many Americans, has scattered to all corners of the country without one central family plot. I was three months into living in the city when one night I happened upon the locked gate to Green-Wood, with its imposing brownstone arch spectrally looming like a Gothic ruin. I returned in daylight, and discovered a place that was as vibrant ecologically as it is architecturally. Towering tulip trees formed allées, and a weeping beech shaded a path with a tunnel of branches. Wild green monk parrots noisily roosted in the spires of the arch; a red-tailed hawk soared low over a granite mausoleum.

I kept returning, eventually leading tours there in collaboration with the Green-Wood Historic Fund. Whether tracking down dead magicians and mediums from the 19th century, or considering the influence of the Ice Age on the hilly terrain, what’s most important for me during these tours is to talk about how experiencing these cemeteries will help them be preserved. I try to emphasize that the cemetery was always meant to be a place for the living; in the 1860s it was second to Niagara Falls in visitor numbers, yet somewhere along the way Americans got less comfortable with burial grounds as places of peace and respite.

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It’s probable that most living New Yorkers will not be buried in New York City. Space is running out for the types of burial that have dominated the American funerary industry since the 19th century, with the coffin and grand monument marking the plot. (Except on Staten Island; much as in life, New Yorkers tend to overlook this roomy borough in death.) Once rural, both Woodlawn and Green-Wood are now bounded by development.

Cemeteries with scarce space are prohibitively expensive; former Mayor Ed Koch reportedly paid $20,000 for a plot in the near-capacity Trinity Cemetery so he could stay in Manhattan. Cremation and above-ground options (like columbaria for holding urns and community mausolea) are increasing in popularity, but more and more, these old landscapes dotted with millions of tombs will have looser relationships to the present population.

I’ve seen how quickly the balance between design and nature can tip when a cemetery is neglected. Bayside Cemetery in Ozone Park, Queens, has suffered from vandalism and neglect for years, a forest of slender trees now shadowing its graves, which date back to the 1860s. Most people view it solely from the A train as it rumbles towards the Rockaways, its overgrowth and feral ornamental plants hiding its monuments as the managing synagogue no longer supports maintenance on the grounds.

By empowering a diverse group of people to find a sense of place in cemeteries—whether it’s a chance to learn the history of those who came to this city before us, go birdwatching, listen to a concert, or just get some peace—these spaces enrich the community that will keep them preserved.

Green-Wood, for instance, is on the highest ground in Brooklyn. If climate change and rising sea levels push the city from the shore, will there be demand to give this place over to homes for the living? It’s highly unlikely that its marble angels will be toppled to make way for condos, but numerous cemeteries have been destroyed in the development of the city. According to a recent article in the New York Times, more than 50 of the city’s parks contain former burial grounds. Skeletons still rest under Washington Square Park, with no memorial to recall their presence; a single marble sarcophagus commemorating three fireman in James J. Walker Park is the only reminder that this patch of Greenwich Village was once a place for the dead.

Just as the rural cemeteries of the 19th century radically reevaluated American approaches to death, it’s time to rethink what we want New York’s cemeteries to be in the 21st century. Hart Island, sequestered as it is and with limited accessibility, may not be a candidate for public programming, but it could be more integrated into the city with improved access, which would also alleviate the stigma of being interred in its isolated grounds.

Cemeteries can be active parts of the city, even while they honor the dead. They remind us to value our own time as well. And the best way for them to survive as places of memorialization and nature is to make them meaningful to the people who are alive now.