A few solitary, turn-of-the-century New Yorkers took advantage of the quiet, lovely paths of the upper portion of Riverside Park in this vintage postcard.
Grant’s Tomb, opened to much fanfare in 1897, looms ahead.
The road beside the Hudson River looks more like the Henry Hudson Parkway, not Riverside Drive, no?
Up ahead, north of Grant’s Tomb, lies another little-known tomb of a child that still exists today.
New York City has a long history of grand, ambitious plans that never make it past the idea stage.
A few examples? Moving sidewalks in Mahattan, a subway tunnel to Staten Island, a bridge spanning 125th Street to New Jersey, and 100-story housing projects in Harlem.
But some of the wackier or just-plain-wrong proposals were focused on Central Park. And that’s just in the park’s first half-century of existence.
“If the various persons who have sought to invade Central Park in the last 60 years, for projects in themselves often worthy, oftener grotesque, and frequently purely commercial, had had their way, there would now be nothing left of the park except a few walks and drives, and a lake on which steamboats and full-rigged ships would be plying,” states an amusing New York Times article from 1918 (headline above).
Among the ideas, according to the article: a theater seating 100,000, a sports stadium, a burial ground for the city’s “distinguished dead,” Grant’s Tomb, the paving of the lower end of the park, free swimming baths, and a speedway that would encircle the entire park.
More outlandish: straightening the circular paths throughout the park so they made the park into a “checkerboard,” a “street railway” running through the park, and cutting up the park and turning it into building lots!
[Vintage postcards: NYPL Digital Gallery]
At the turn of the 19th century, George Frederick Cooke was the A-list star actor in his native England.
He was deemed a figure of the “first rank of the London stage” whose portrayal of Richard III at Covent Garden Theatre in 1800 cemented his rep as “the leading tragedian of the day.”
But like many artists, Cooke was an alcoholic. He’d vanish from the stage for long periods, and when he made it to a performance, he was “often so drunk as to not be able to come on the stage at all,” recalls the New York Times in 1873.
As with countless other actors, his addiction torpedoed his career. So Cooke left London and went on tour in New York in November 1810.
Here, he played Richard III to rapt, star-struck audiences at the Park Theatre, then on Park Row.
Unfortunately, he never made it back to England. The War of 1812 left him stuck in the city, and the 56-year-old actor died here that year of cirrhosis.
Now his story gets more dramatic. Cooke was buried behind St. Paul’s Chapel on Fulton Street in a pauper’s grave, supposedly without his head, which he’d willed to science to pay down his debts, according to rumors.
His skull was also reported to have made it on stage—as a prop in a British performance of Hamlet later that century.
A monument to Cooke was erected at St. Paul’s by his protegee, British thespian Edmund Kean in 1821. His body was reburied there, but whether it was intact remains a mystery.
[Photo at right: from Findagrave.com]
Pastoral, gentle Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx doesn’t have the recognition of Green-Wood Cemetery or The Evergreens, both in Brooklyn.
But it’s a similar kind of final resting place: an 1863 “rural” cemetery created after burials were banned in Manhattan for health reasons, and designed almost as parks, for leisure as well as mourning—composed of rolling hills with the remains of 300,000 New Yorkers underneath.
Like Green-Wood and The Evergreens, it’s open to visitors, who are allowed to navigate the landscape and gaze at the angels and other figures that decorate many of the mausoleums and graves.
Captain G.H. Winter was a firefighter, the hat tells us. Could he be the same G.H. Winter awarded a medal for bravery in 1944? This grave looks older than that.
This Botticelli-tressed figure at the Curtis family tomb isn’t merely in mourning—she’s despondent and heartbroken.
Many of New York’s leaders and hometown celebs are buried at Woodlawn: actors, politicians, sports stars, musicians. A complete list is here.
Was the gorgeous elm tree at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park (at left in 1936) used for public executions?
It’s a legend passed down over the years.
On one hand, a Parks Department web link seems to imply that people were indeed hanged from the 110-foot tree, estimated to be at least 300 years old.
“The [sic] English elm (Ulmus procera) at the corner of Waverly Place and MacDougal Street acquired its reputation during the American Revolutionary War,” the site explains. “According to legend, traitors were hung from its branches.”
In 1797, the city acquired the land for a potter’s field. “The field was also used for public executions, giving rise to the tale of the Hangman’s Elm. . . ” another Parks Department link states.
In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette, visiting from France, supposedly witnessed the hanging of 20 highwaymen here in 1824.
Newgate State Prison was just a stone’s throw away on Christopher and 10th Streets; inmates sentenced to death were reportedly walked over and hanged here.
Newspaper archives through the 19th century contain several stories that refer to the “hanging elm.” But perhaps the articles simply repeated the legend.
The only actual recorded execution in the vicinity was of a young woman named Rose Butler, convicted of arson and strung up on a gallows across the street in 1820.
Here’s the story of the city’s other most notorious tree . . . until it was knocked down.
[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collection; middle photo: Wikipedia]
This angel looks to be weeping or wiping away a tear as she (he?) guards a grave at the Evergreens Cemetery on the Brooklyn-Queens border.
More angels just like this one stand by tombstones all over this necropolis of about half a million, which includes the graves of many German immigrants who settled in nearby Bushwick in the 19th century after the cemetery was founded in 1849.
It’s a lovely place to visit on a warm summer day.
Hiding between Shake Shack and Eataly just outside Madison Square Park is one of only two military grave sites in the city.
It contains the remains of William Jenkins Worth.
A celebrated general, Worth’s military career started with the War of 1812 and was cut short after the Mexican-American War, when he contracted cholera in San Antonio in 1849.
After his death, city leaders decided to honor him with a memorial in what was then an elite residential neighborhood.
While his body was temporarily interred in Green-Wood Cemetery, a 51-foot granite obelisk went up, listing names of crucial battle sites of his career.
A bronze relief of Worth on a horse fronts the obelisk, and military regalia decorate the cast-iron fence surrounding it.
It’s a grand monument—but it’s easy to miss as you cross that tricky intersection of 25th Street, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue (a pocket park called Worth Square).
It’s even easier to disregard the fact that Worth’s body lies under the obelisk. He was reburied here in 1857 during a processional involving 6,500 soldiers and a speech from Mayor Fernando Wood.
Where’s the other military gravesite in Manhattan? Grant’s Tomb, 100 blocks northwest. General Worth is also the namesake of Worth Street, and we have him to thank for Fort Worth, Texas, and Lake Worth, Florida.
Since 1869, more than 800,000 paupers and unknowns have been buried on Hart Island.
This slip of land in the East River is New York’s Potter’s Field, where inmates from nearby Rikers Island place coffins in mass plots topped by granite markers.
Yet there’s one solitary plot, dated 1985, that’s especially heartbreaking: it’s the final resting place of the first child to die of AIDS whose body was brought to Hart Island.
Melinda Hunt, vice president of the Hart Island Project, describes how she and a photographer discovered the plot after visiting the island in 1992:
“Buried deep in the wooded area, however, there was one marker with an unusual number, ‘SC-B1, 1985,’” writes Hunt.
“Upon inquiry, we found that the marker belonged to a solitary grave of the first child victim of AIDS to be buried on Hart Island. Extra precautions were taken to bury the child in a separate and deeper grave.”
“This AIDS grave seemed like a ‘tomb to an unknown child.’ It came to represent all children who were yet to die of AIDS as well as child victims of earlier epidemics.”
This photo of the granite grave marker comes from the Hart Island Project website.
Who was this child—and what circumstances made a lonely patch of Hart Island his or her final resting place? Records must exist somewhere.
[Photo at right: ©1991 Fred Conrad/The New York Times. It was reprinted in 2006.]
Elizabeth Jennings was running late.
It was July 16, 1854, and Jennings, a 24-year-old teacher, was headed to the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street and the Bowery.
At Chatham and Pearl Streets, she boarded a streetcar. Like schools, hotels, and many jobs, streetcars operated on a de facto color line and often refused black New Yorkers.
On this summer morning, the driver insisted Jennings get off and wait for a colored streetcar. She said no.
“I told him . . . I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York . . . and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church,” she later said, according to a 2005 New York Times article.
Jennings was forced off. But the story was just beginning. Her prominent family hired a young lawyer (and future U.S. president) named Chester Arthur to take her case.
Jennings won and received $250 in damages. Still, it took several years of lawsuits for the city’s streetcars to be fully desegregated.
Elizabeth Jennings married and had a son; she ran a school for black children and died in 1901. She’s buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, but her name lives on with this City Hall street sign.
In the years after the Revolutionary War, Brooklynites living along Wallabout Bay off the East River were greeted almost daily by a macabre sight.
Human bones and skulls, bleached by the sun, would be unearthed by tides, washing ashore.
These were the remains of men who died aboard the prison ships—16 rotted, disease-ridden vessels docked near Wallabout Bay, where British soldiers held thousands of captive patriots in horrific conditions.
More than 11,500 prisoners perished on these ships, their bodies thrown overboard or hastily buried in waterside graves.
“For many years after the end of the war, the sandy beaches of Wallabout Bay remained littered with the bones of men who died in the prison ships—one resident of the area described skulls lying about as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield. . . . ” wrote Edwin G. Burrows in his 2008 book Forgotten Patriots.
In 1808, residents collected the bones and built a small crypt for them on Front Street and Hudson and Hudson Avenue, in today’s Vinegar Hill.
As decades passed, city leaders called for a more heroic monument to the men known as the prison ship martyrs.
The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park was dedicated in 1908. Twenty-two boxes containing a fraction of the remains of the martyrs are still inside a vault there today.
[A prison ship anchored in the bay; Wallabout Bay, site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in 1851, 70 or so years after the ships occupied the bay]
