Standing in Washington Square Park in New York City, it’s hard to believe the cobblestones and iconic archway are built on bones. But beneath the feet of NYU art majors and the paws of spoiled Greenwich pups, are the remains of a massive pauper’s grave, which interred more than 20,000 corpses between 1797 and 1825, many killed in successive yellow fever epidemics.
The city’s parks may be welcoming the dead once again. As the coronavirus death toll ticks up, New York is considering “temporary interments,” according to city councilmember Mark Levine. “This likely will be done by using a NYC park for burials (yes you read that right),” Levine tweeted Monday. “Trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line.” While a spokesperson for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner told BuzzFeed it has no plans for park interments, and Mayor Bill de Blasio said he doesn’t want to talk “publicly” about the city’s plans, the possibility of such grim history repeating has captured many New Yorkers’ attention.
While Lower East Siders may fancy Washington Square Park’s ghostly origins unique, they’re actually part of an international trend in land reuse. From Washington Square in New York to Cemetery Memorial Park in Ventura, California to Postman Park in London, cities have been transforming graves into gardens for centuries. The decisions have been motivated by everything from money to poor memory, but local activists and archaeologists have shown that every park has its own special legacy—and there are many more bones to uncover.
Elizabeth Meade is an archaeologist with AKRF, one of the biggest environmental engineering firms in the northeast. She’s also wrapping up her Ph.D. student at the City University of New York, where she’s spent the last few years painstakingly documenting 527 cemeteries in the five boroughs. The roughly 200 resulting maps show the boundary lines of graveyards still open for business, historic sites just beneath the surface, and tombs 30 feet deep.
“There were quite a few that were reclaimed specifically to make parks,” Meade said. Washington Square, Madison Square, and Bryant Parks are the best known, given their well-documented histories as 18th and 19th century as potters’ fields—a plot where the city held indigent burials. In these cases, “the city owned [the land] already, and they could easily convert it,” Meade said.
But others were taken by force. Central Park mowed over “several” cemeteries, Meade said. The best known is Seneca Village, a free black community the city cleared away to build the first public park in the United States. Downtown, in Greenwich Village, James J. Walker Park was built on the former St. John’s Burial Ground, which buried more than 10,000 bodies between 1799 and 1858. In 1895, “the city just took it by eminent domain,” Meade said. Only the bodies of well-known New Yorkers were moved. The rest remained.