The potter’s fields that became city parks

Next time you find yourself lounging in a Manhattan park, consider the thousands of residents who may have occupied the site before you—when it was a cemetery.

Washington Square Park, Madison Square Park, and Bryant Park are among the parks that started out as potter’s fields.

Here the city laid to rest its paupers, prisoners, unclaimed and diseased until the mid-19th century.

Madison Square Park was the first, in 1794. When it was full in 1797, potter’s field was moved to Washington Square, to a parcel  “. . . bounded on the road leading from the Bowery Lane at the two Mile Stone to Greenwich,” according to It Happened in Washington Square by Emily Kies Folpe.

Estimates vary, but up to 100,000 New Yorkers may have been buried there—with the tombstone of a possible Yellow Fever victim popping up in 2009.

“After the yellow fever epidemic of 1823, with Greenwich booming just to the west, and Bond Street burgeoning just to the east, the city barred further burials and routed new corpses north to what is today Bryant Park,” states New York City historian and author Mike Wallace in a 2007 New York Times interview.

When that potter’s field was chosen as the site of the Croton Reservoir in the 1840s, “the remains of 100,000 paupers and strangers were transferred in 1857 to Ward’s Island, and then, finally, to Hart Island, acquired by the city in 1868, with 45 acres of the 100 acre island being set aside as a potter’s field that opened the following year,” says Wallace.

To this day, Hart Island, off the Bronx, remains the city’s potter’s field—and the former burial grounds underwent pretty makeovers into lovely parks.

[Washington Square Park and Bryant Park photos from the 1930s, from the NYPL Digital Collection]

Washington Square Park’s “Tramp’s Retreat”

“This image of a ragged fellow begging from a well-dressed woman in Washington Square . . . testifies to Washington Square’s split personality at the end of the 19th century,” writes Emily Kies Folpe in her terrific book, It Happened in Washington Square.

Folpe quotes an 1892 Century magazine article about the Square, which notes that one section was populated by homeless men and called “Tramp’s Retreat.”

This Harper‘s piece from 1900 identifies as on the southwest end.

While the northern, Fifth Avenue side of Washington Square was as elite and genteel as it was 50 years earlier, the southern side was now bordered by rooming houses . . . and filled with tramps.

“To the tramp, who is attracted hither in summer by the cool shade, the square serves several purposes. It serves him first in the capacity of a restaurant, where he may eat his luncheon unmolested,” states the Harper’s article.

Lastly it serves him as a lodging house, where he slumbers peacefully until the ‘sparrow cop’ comes around and awakens him.”

[Washington Square postcard from the NYPL Digital Collection]

Two famous writers meet in Washington Square

Imagine two celebrities today greeting each other on a Greenwich Village street, then sitting on a park bench together just shooting the breeze, apparently unrecognized.

That’s what happened one day in September 1887, when Mark Twain took the train from his Connecticut home to New York to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, the popular writer of Treasure Island.

“The Scottish-born Stevenson was staying near the square at a hotel on Tenth Street and University Place,” writes Emily Kies Folpe in the wonderful It Happened in Washington Square.

Stevenson, suffering from tuberculosis, was passing through the city on his way to an upstate sanitarium.

“The two famous writers strolled down to the park and, following Stevenson’s doctor’s orders to take in the sun every day, settled down on a sunny bench to enjoy a good talk.”

So what did they discuss? According to the website of the Hotel Albert (now a co-op), where Stevenson likely stayed on 10th Street:

“The two men settled comfortably into a sunny part of the northwest corner of the park and spent the next five hours telling stories to one another, ‘regardless of wives, lunch and doctors, from 10 a.m….until 3 in the afternoon.'”

Twain moved to the Village in 1900 and spend the rest of his life as a New Yorker. Stevenson died at 44, seven years after his park meetup with Twain.