NOTE
Descriptions of cemeteries are originally from Time Out New York magazine article "Respite in Peace" by Pete Wells in the July 31-August 7, 1996 issue. Web links provided are not from the article.
MANHATTAN
Trinity Churchyard
Entrance on Broadway at Wall Street.
Subway: 1,9,N,R to Rector St; 4,5 to Wall St. Mon-Fri 7am-4pm, Sat, Sun and holidays 7am-3pm. Map of cemetery available inside church.
Wall Street starts at a river and ends at a graveyard. Everybody knows this, but nobody knows what it means. Maybe it's supposed to inspire humility; if so, Trinity is the right cemetery to do the job. Most of the stones epitomize the puritan style: They try to convince us that we'll all be better off after we're dead. The engravings (winged hourglasses, skulls, crossbones) are meant to knock the vanity out of you, fast. In spite of all that gloom, bankers and secretaries manage to eat lunch on the benches around the yard. The stone above the grave of Richard Churcher , who died in 1681, is the oldest in the city; it is in excellent condition, while stones all around it have been worn down by time and the elements. Alexander Hamilton was buried here after a duel with Aaron burr. Near him are Robert Fulton, the steamboat inventor, and Capt. James Lawrence, who was killed during a battle on board his warship during the War of 1812. Carved on his monument are his dying words, "Don't give up the ship!" along with a miniature relief of that vessel, its tiny cannons pointed at the church.
See Trinity Churchyard - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
See Trinity Churchyard. This student's site includes historical information, photos of graves, and further links.
St. Paul's Churchyard
Entrance on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey Streets.
Subway: C, E to World Trade Center; N, R, 1, 9 to Cortlandt St; J,M,Z,2,3,4 to Fulton St. Mon-Fri 9am-2pm, Sun 7am-2pm. Map of cemetery available inside church.
The Skulls of Trinity had fallen out of fashion when most of these stones were carved; moon-faced cherubs were by then the rage. They don't do much to brighten the mood, though, as the stones are inscribed with some of the most depressing little poems ever written. Read this one some day when you're feeling pleased with yourself:How lov'd, how valu'd once, avails thee not
To whom related or by whom begot
A heap of dust is all remains of thee
It's all thou art & all the world shall be.
St. Paul's, which is elevated above the surrounding streets and looks out at the World Trade Center, is also popular with brown-baggers.
Trinity Cemetery
Main entrance to western section on 153rd Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive.
Entrance to eastern section on Amsterdam Avenue at 154th Street.
Subway: 1 to 157th St; A,C,B to 155th St. 9am-4:30pm (check in at Riverside Dr office first). Map available inside office.
Trinity uptown is the largest, most dramatic cemetery in Manhattan, despite what's happened to the neighborhood since the first burials here in the 1840s. It has some wonderful Gothic brownstones mausoleums, any number of obelisks and some great carvings, like the one depicting a fatal shipwreck. And the crypts in the western half, built into the side of a steep hill, face the Hudson and the Palisades: each one a tomb with a view. Every Christmas Eve, children come to the grave of Clement Clarke Moore for a reading of his poem that begins, "'Twas the night before Christmas." Across Broadway is the tomb of John James Audubon, whose country estate this once was. It is marked by a Celtic cross, engraved on one side with some of the birds he became famous painting. On the other side are mammals; look at the top for a flying bat.
See Trinity Cemetery - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie
East 10th Street at Second Avenue.
Subway: 6 to Astor Pl. 11am-5pm.
People pass this yard every day without realizing it's a cemetery. Maybe it's because all the vault markers are flush with the ground, or maybe it's because the space doubles as a playground, with a sandbox set in the middle of the tombs. When the East Village was Peter Stuyvesant's farm and the Bowrey was his driveway, this was the site of his private chapel. In 1878, grave robbers crept into this cemetery, stole the body of A.T. Stewart, the richest man of his day, and held it for ransom. This ghoulish escapade terrified New York's aristocracy, which started constructing impregnable mausoleums to protect their bones at Woodlawn and other cemeteries outside Manhattan. Stewart's kidnappers, by the way, demanded $200,000, but settled for $20,000 after they had spent a few days with his corpse.
New York Marble Cemetery
Entrance on Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets.
Subway: 6 to Bleecker St; F to Second Ave. The cemetery is closed to the public, but visible from the street.
See below for description.
New York City Marble Cemetery
52-74 East 2nd Street between First and Second Avenues.
Subway 6 to Bleeker St; F to Second Ave. The cemetery is closed to the plublic, but visible from the street.
The East Village is the last place you'd expect to find a remnant of Edith Wharton's New York ,but these two cemeteries were New York's most fashionable when they were founded in the 1830s. Noticing that churchyards tend to shrink or disappear as the city grew, a handful of wealthy families purchased these lots, and they are the only cemeteries in Manhattan that have kept their original boundaries. You can't see much of the New York Marble Cemetery from the street, but there's not much to see besides a well-kept lawn anyway. The dead are marked with marble tablets set into the surrounding wall.
The New York City Marble Cemetery is another story. With its tall spires, urn sculptures and crypts, it's a lovely little garden of death. President James Monroe stayed here briefly, then was exhumed and packed off to Virginia. The most intriguing grave belongs to the victim of heart-breaking parental cruelty: a shipping merchant named Preserved Fish. With one or two exceptions, the dead here are all descendents of the original founders. A few years ago, the trustees discovered a tiny coffin lodged in the tool shed. After sifting through the records, they learned the deceased was an infant born to two refugees from Castro's Cuba in the early 1960s. The parents paid a caretaker a small fee to hold the coffin until Castro's fall, so the child could be properly buried back home. More than 30 years later, Castro is still in power and the infant is still on 2nd Street.
Also see the Forgotten NY Cemeteries Web site which includes photos and further information about these two cemeteries along with information about more cemeteries in New York City.
First Shearith Israel Graveyard
St. James Place between James and Oliver Streets, off Chatham Square.
Subway: J,M,Z to Chambers St; 4,5,6 to Brooklyn Bridge.
Second Shearith Israel Graveyard
72-76 West 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
Subway: 1,2,3,9,F to 14th St; L to Sixth Ave.
Third Shearith Israel Cemetery
98-110 West 21st Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
Subway: 1,9,F,N,R to 23rd St. The cemetery is closed to the public, but visible from the street.
These graveyards contain the early members of the first Jewish congregation in North America. The descendants of a community of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal, they migrated to Brazil and finally found a permanent home in New York. (Their synagogue is now on Central Park West.) The St. James graveyard, dating back to 1656, is the first Jewish cemetery in the U.S. and the oldest of any kind in Manhattan. Once sprawling, it is now only a tiny sliver in a forgotten corner of Chinatown. The second is a little bigger, and sits in the heart of the Village waiting to surprise passersby. The third, containing some 150 graves in Chelsea, seems enormous in comparison. Stones are in English, Hebrew, and Ladino, something like a spanish equivalent of Yiddish.
Also see the Forgotten NY Cemeteries Web site which includes photos and further information about these three cemeteries along with information about more cemeteries in New York City.
Old St. Patrick's Cathedral
260-64 Mulberry Street at Prince Street.
Subway: 6 to Spring St; N,R to Prince St. The cemetery is closed to the public, but partly visible from the street.
Five years ago this month, John Cardinal O'Connor and a few other Catholic clergy stood in the yard of Old St. Patrick's to witness the exhumation of Pierre Toussaint. Born into slavery in Haiti in 1766, Toussaint moved to New York City with the family who owned him. They soon fell on hard times, but Toussaint came to the rescue, opening a hair salon in Little Italy and supporting his masters with his earnings. This was above and beyond the call of duty, and he was finally rewarded with his freedom. After prodding from New York's Haitian community, O'Connor proposed Toussaint for canonization in 1990. While the Church tries to substantiate Toussaint's miracles, his bones have been moved to the Archbishop's Crypt, below the altar at the new St. Pat's, on Fifth Avenue. Toussaint's original stone, broken but still partly legible, leans against a wall in the church's basement, near the catacombs holding New York's first Catholic bishops.
QUEENS
Old Calvary Cemetery
Main entrance on Greenpoint Avenue between Bradley and 51st Avenues.
Travel: LIRR to Penny Bridge. 8am-4pm.
Here the dead may rest, but not in peace. The tranquility Calvary enjoyed when the first burial took place, in 1848, has since been destroyed by the clanging of heavy industrial along its south border and the rumble of traffic thundering along both the Long Island Expressway to the north and an elevated section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the east. Although visitors to the Calvary can see the unforgettable sight of somber marble angels silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, the surrounding noise literally shakes the ground.
There are more dead people in this cemetery and New Calvary to the north -- nearly 3 million -- than there are live ones in the entire borough of Queens. Governor Alfred E. Smith, gangster Thomas "Three-Finger Brown" Luchese and Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay are all buried here. The person who would be most surprised to find himself in this position, however, is probably Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist who collaborated with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte. Da Ponte died in Italy in 1838, but opera-loving New Yorkers moved him to Calvary nearly a hundred years later.
Machpelah Cemetery
Entrance on Cypress Hills Road between 80th Avenue and Interborough Parkway.
Subway: J to Cypress Hills. 9am-4pm.
Cemetery adminstrators are usually thrilled to bury celebrities, but the people who run Machpelah must now wish that Harry Houdini had chosen a different final resting place. Perhaps because he died on Halloween, the national holiday for vandals, his grave has been the target of some ugly acts. His marble bust was smashed, as was its replacement, and one year, some creeps dug up a few nearby coffins and tossed the bones around. Cemetery officials apparently decided that the vandals were attracted by the "Broken Wand" ceremony the Society of American Magicians held at the grave on the anniversary of his death. For the last few Halloweens, the gates have been locked, with guards and even a police helicopter on the lookout. Now the magicians are forced to the celebrate the anniversary on the corresponding date in the Jewish calendar. Beginning at the time of his death, 1:23pm, there is a prayer from a rabbi, eulogies from S.A.M bigwigs and then the breaking of a wand over the grave, symbolizing the magic that is lost when a magician dies. Although the ceremony is invitation-only, you can watch if from the front gate, a few yards from the grave.
See Machpelah Cemetery - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
BROOKLYN
Friends Cemetery
Entrance off Center Drive in west end of Prospect Park (718-768-8829).
Subway: F to 15th St. Visits by appointment only.
This simple Quaker burial ground was here before Prospect Park, which now surrounds it. One grave belongs to Montgomery Clift, who is probably still drying out from his final alchohol and downer binge, which ended in 1966.
Green-Wood Cemetery
Entrances: Fifth Avenue at 25th Street.
Fort Hamilton Parkway at McDonald Avenue (718-768-7300).
Subway: R to 25th St, F to Ft Hamilton Pkwy. Tours every Sun at 1pm beginning Sept 1, $5. Call John Cashman for meeting place (718-469-5277).
Green-Wood is perhaps the city's finest sculpture garden and one of its most important historic landmarks. Unfortunately, getting to see it can be a hassle. The guards can be quite strict about admitting only family and friends of those buried here. You can either call the cemetery to make an appointment or take a tour with John Cashman. The second option has a lot going for it, as Mr. Cashman, a retired police sergeant and self-taught historian, knows more about Green-Wood than anybody and has collected literature, photographs, postcards and stereographs of Green-Wood all his life. As a teenager, he lived nearby and worked for a florist across from one of the gates; the gravediggers and groundskeepers showed him around the rolling hills, lakes and winding paths, introducing him to the permanent residents.
On Sundary afternoons, Mr Cashman briskly escorts the curious around the hundreds of astonishing Victorian monuments, stopping to talk about the people buried here: Leonard Bernstein, Currier and Ives, Peter Cooper, Diamond Jim Brady, Albert Anastasia, Lola Montez, Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley, Samuel Morse, the Brooks Brothers, and others with unfamiliar names but interesting lives or especially striking graves. Of the latter these stand out: the Egyptian pyramid that is the Van Ness family crypt; the full-size bronze sculpture of Minerva; the weeping angel kneeling before the Cassard family marker; the marble cameo of five-year-old "Precious Georgie"; the several firemen's monuments; the train wreck depicted on the Dietzel monument; the grave of Elias Howe's dog Fannie (with a poetic epitaph that begins, "Only a dog, do you say, Sir Critic?")
See Green-Wood Cemetery - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
BRONX
Woodlawn Cemetery
Entrances: Jerome Avenue at Bainbridge Avenue.
East 233rd Street at Webster Avenue.
Travel: 4 or Metro-North to Woodlawn. 9am-4:30pm. Maps available from the guards.
The idiosyncratic graves at Green-Wood often illustrate some peculiarity of the individual buried below. At Woodlawn, the message is simpler: money. Big money. Robber barons competed with each other to make their mausoleums as lavish as their Fifth Avenue mansions or their Newport "cottages." They even hired the same architects: Richard Morris Hunt, Stanford White, James Renwick and Louis Comfort Tiffany all built tombs at Woodlawn. (Look through mausoleum doors to check for Tiffany windows.) Their interpretations of Greek and Egyptian temples, Gothic churches and Renaissance chapels are built to last. You can't always say the same about the reputations of the men inside. Jay Gould, a railroad magnate once called "the most hated man in America," built a sparkling marble Parthenon on a hill; today, almost no one remembers him, and his mausoleum looks lonely on its generous plot. Other names here include Woolworth, Macy, J.C. Penney, Straus, Bache, Westinghouse, Armour, Belmont, Whitney and Guggenheim. Ironically, some of the smaller gravestones mark those of whose fame outlived that of the businessmen. Miles Davis and Duke Ellington are close enough to jam; painter Joseph Stella, writer Damon Runyan, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and early feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton have modest markers, but their names jump off the stones. One carved with a quill and blank scroll, commemorates a person then considered a minor author whose early promise had fizzled. Now Herman Melville's fame dwarfs Jay Gould's - one of the nice things death can do.
See Woodlawn Cemetery - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
STATEN ISLAND
Moravian Cemetery
Entrance on Richmond Road at Otis Avenue.
Travel: Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island; then Staten Island Rapid Transit to Grant City; walk to Richmond Rd, make left; follow two blocks to Otis Ave.
A beautiful example of the landscaped garden cemetery, Moravian's highest plots have amazing views of the harbor. The best monuments though, are down below. Although there aren't anywhere near as many remarkable sculptures or mausoleums as at Green-Wood or Woodlawn, the nicest ones are still a delight. The most fun are two full-sized classical women cast in zinc, standing ten yards apart in an eternal face-off. Most jaw-dropping is the ornate Kunhardt family plot; it looks like the entrance to a small museum. The courtyard, enclosed by a marlbe railing, could hold about a hundred mourners. All the way at the end of Central Avenue is the entrance to the private mausoleum built by Cornelius Vanderbilt. You can't get in, but you get some idea of the hubris involved by looking at the stone arch above the iron gates - like the entrance to a medieval city.
See Moravian Cemetery - from findagrave.com. Lists people buried there and includes photos of their graves.
St. Andrews's Churchyard
4 Arthur Kill Road at Richmond Hill Road (718-351-0900).
Travel: Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island; then take the S113 to Richmond Town to Arthur Kill Rd; walk down the block. The cemetery is unlocked at all times.
The oldest gravestones here date to the 18th century, and many are illegible now. The main reason to visit is that it feels like you're way out in the country, a hundred miles from New York City. There's a rustic stone church, a white woodframe parsonage and a little creek running alongside the churchyard. If only more of Staten Island felt so pastoral.
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Cemetery
Entrance on Crabtree Avenue between Bloomingdale and Veterans Roads.
Travel: Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island; then S74 to Bloomingdale Rd and Kramer Ave. The cemetery is usually unlocked.
Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer who died in May at the age of 87, used to wander the churchyards on Staten Island's back roads "when things get too much for me," as he put it in a piece called "Mr. Hunter's Grave": "Invariably, for some reason I don't know and don't want to know, afer I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring the rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk." One one of those walks, he found Sandy Ground, a village settled before the Civil War by free blacks who migrated north to work Staten Island's oyster beds. They lived in small, handmade houses and buried their dead in this flat field at the end of a dirt road. George Hunter, a trustee of Sandy Ground's church, wanted to be buried in the same grave with his wife. When she died, he asked the gravedigger to bury her eight feet down so there would be room for him. He later learned that the gravedigger "had crossed me up" by marking the grave too shallow to hold both coffins. But Mr. Hunter had already had a stone carved with both his and his wife's names; he would have to be buried a few yards away. "Ah, well," he told Mitchell, "it won't make any difference." To this day, Mr Hunter's gravestone records only his name and year of birth - 1869. It does not say when he died, and it lies about where he is buried.