The Urban Dead: Situating Fiction, Myth and Memory in New York City’s Internal and Peripheral Cemeteries

Alison B. Snyder
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, USA
asnyder@pratt.edu

Introduction

Since Manahatta was taken by the Dutch in 1626 from the Native American Lenape, New Amsterdam quickly grew, yet by 1664, the British took control and began calling it Manhattan. Perhaps these new settler aspirations made room for the eventual urban myths associated with pursuing a type of life while engaging—or not—with death. At first, burials followed previously known norms largely associated with churches and their adjacent yards; yet, one early exception was created by the Sephardic Portuguese settlers whose Jewish cemeteries were separate from their synagogues. As populations increased exponentially, growing from hundreds to thousands to close to 100,000 by 1810, death due to various disease and wars called for new burial considerations.(1) 

What was Manhattan’s early government to do? Beyond the religiously associated graveyards for the named, large public burial plots were first established in the 1790’s to inter the poor or unidentified sick, the killed soldiers who came from Britain and parts of Europe, and the enslaved or other early New Yorker-Americans. These spaces became known as “potter’s fields,” or enclosed mass graves. With continued expansion, planning for the infamous 1811 Grid was enacted as a way to order the presumed design and growth for the new city beyond the organic layout of the island’s southern tip. The new parcels and streets were laid over Lenape paths, streams and wetlands, settler farms and their homes, and other new private and public structures. With these notable ideas of progress, the era also reflected the influence of social and hygienic fears.(2) Indeed, another private type of burial first implemented in 1830, was designed with underground family crypts and called the New York Marble Cemetery.(3)

From a mapping standpoint, burial sites designated prior to the gridding were not exactly shown, but the John Randel, Jr. map of 1821, and other property maps and land surveys (Sanborn, Perris, Bromley, etc.) (4)would include the gravesites of the early religiously-affiliated cemeteries, potter’s fields, and other graves such as homestead and other African enslaved cemeteries.(5) 

Over time, new laws confirmed needed space for urban growth due to more fears. The rules moved burials first up to Canal Street (1823), then to 14^th Street (1833), and finally, in 1851, death was pushed up to 86^th Street, before no other new cemeteries were allowed within the island.(6)

The result of all these city transformations centered on moving death further away from daily life, enforced modes of obscuring, omission, displacement and exiling until a kind of erasure of our awareness of mortality produced a myth. The migration of burial sites inside the city, created conditions that limited, closed or partially cut up the cemeteries as they moved northward. Though some were eventually exempted from full destruction and remain locked in place (but are maintained even today); others, such as some of the crypt burials were also privately managed and allowed to function indefinitely. Most striking, are the stories and spatial developments associated with the potter’s fields inside Manhattan. Not only were they eventually closed with many reinterred elsewhere, but their burial legacy was hidden and covered over, even with some human remains still in place.(7) Visiting these sites today, the histories seem to start with commemorating American independence and notable patriots, presidents, etc.(8) Thus, the reality of experiencing the “deathscape” as a part of daily life radically shifted.(9) Urban archaeologist, Elizabeth D. Meade insists that this term is a lens through which to analyze the landscape of the city whose social cultural processes must be associated with death. 

Beginning Realizations, Methods and Questions 

To speak about, investigate and illustrate the experiences (or inexperiences) surrounding the state of graveyards or burials situated in New York City today and the life-death continuum, this research focuses on a selection of what can be called internal burial remnant sites located within Manhattan Island; and, peripheral cemetery sites located within two surrounding boroughs—Brooklyn and Queens. Selected examples are divided into four striking “types” of interment, spanning development since the 1600’s, and thus exposing different traditions, histories, heritages, and religious affiliations, amongst different scales of graveyards and their functional layouts.

Figure 1: Showing current NYC city relationships between “internal” Manhattan and “peripheral” Queens and Brooklyn, the selected deathscapes are located. (copyright Alison B. Snyder)

Questions arise about today’s knowledge and understanding of why these burial sites are where they are, how we might (or might not) engage with them, and what the resulting urban realities versus fictions or myths might entail, concerning the potential for daily spiritual exchange. The concepts of erasing, hiding or concealing mostly takes place “inside” Manhattan—composing an urban myth, that portrays the Island (internal) as a place for the living, and furthering the fiction by conditioning people to overlook death because it is too unsanitary or unspeakable. So, the dead essentially live elsewhere, “outside”—in the periphery. But, even with the creation of fictions, myths and incomplete memory, research and experiencing these sites suggest that there is not a total erosion of possible awareness.

Short narratives describe the internal sites, including: type 1 – [four] still visible, small cemetery “remnants” (Jewish-Sephardic and Catholic), type 2 – [one] small to medium size, still functioning, underground set of “crypts” (Non-denominational), and type 3 – [four] “potter’s fields, now parks” (Non-denominational, Unknown). The peripheral sites include type 4 – [four] large to extra-large historic and functioning “park-like cemeteries” (designated Interfaith, Non-Sectarian, Christian, Jewish-Ashkenazic/Sephardic). Assorted mappings show how the major city time periods and urban expansion, density of burials within the current city and the past; and, comparisons of layouts and urban interior partitions are combined with other hand-done visualizations and/or photographic documentation with annotation of phenomenological nuances that detail experiencing the sites today.(10)

Figure 2: The composite of maps feature nine Manhattan (internal-remnants) and four Brooklyn and Queens (peripheral-whole) deathscapes. (copyright Alison B. Snyder)

Abbreviated Framings and Conclusions 

A few interdisciplinary voices bring the key points of this paper together. Profane time in the city, such as ordinary walking here and there; and, what might be considered sacred space and activity, such as coming upon a cemetery remnant (churchyard or not), or intentionally entering a cemetery (whether known or new), are intertwined—not fully separate experiences. Indeed, philosopher and historian Michel Foucault wrote about the “strange heterotopia of the cemetery…a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces.”(11) Author and phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade has written: “…[sacred] space is not homogeneous; [one] experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.”(12) And we can apply another sort of duality from theorist, critic and semiotician, Roland Barthes who introduced two Latin terms that can be applied to how one may experience the simultaneity of engaging with burial sites. The studium suggests an assumed broad or macro set of outlooks and observations, while the punctum is a form of detail that may be felt or seen immediately, and its affects become surprisingly awesome and meaningful.(13) 

Finally, a sort of similar pattern of assumption and realization may occur as one learns that city parks are actually built over potter’s fields; or why Queens or Brooklyn cemeteries have a marginal or peripheral position today, while still functioning. When given the information, the remarkable new awareness triggers surprise, disbelief, sadness while other responses bring imaginative memories one did not know was possible to conjure. Unique and universal understandings can also occur whether in quiet or dense, or chaotic and layered deathscapes. Religious historian, Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that sacred space is constructed, and memory might be curated, obscured, or contested.(14) While Psychologist Clark E. Moustakas’s experiential models for approaching, sensing and witnessing are useful for comprehending how different types of cemeteries are places where life-death, memory, and myth intersect. Realizations occur even when visits are unplanned and are not about specific mourning.(15) Therefore, the historical layering of the city becomes more real, and the sacred feels like it is absorbed and momentarily tangible, not erased.(16)

Footnotes

1.  “Timeline of NYC,” Wikipedia, accessed May 4, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_New_York_City and “NYC: Booms and Blooms,” NYC Data Academy, accessed 1 November 2025,  https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/new-york-city-booms-and-blooms/
2. “The Greatest Grid,” Museum of the City of New York, accessed January 10, 2024,  https://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/the-1811-plan
3.  “New York City Cemetery Project” accessed January 10, 2024, https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/?s=ny+marble
4.  “New York Public LibraryFire Insurance, Topographic and Property Maps,” accessed October 2025, https://www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-recommendations/guides/fire-topo-property-maps   
5.  Note, that the enslaved or African gravesites in NYC, are only mentioned as types, but are not featured in this paper.
6.  Elizabeth D. Meade, ‘“Prepare for death and follow me”: An archaeological survey of the historic period
7.  Deborah Ann Buelow, “Peripheral Memory: New York’s Forgotten Landscape,” (MS in Architecture Studies, MIT, June 2010), 38, 39.
8.  There is no signage or any other indication of history associated with potter’s field burial or commemoration of what everyone gathering in these “parks” is standing above. Nor is there information on city websites. 
9.  Elizabeth D. Meade, ‘“Prepare for death and follow me,” iv. And, the term deathscapes is also associated with cemetery studies and necrogeography, see also, Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway, eds., Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning, and Remembrance (Ashgate Publishing, 2010).
10.  This research grows out of my earlier interest and research on NYC cemeteries. A co-authored project began as a conference paper that centered on comparing New York City and Istanbul cemeteries (where I often research). We were subsequently invited to expand the work into a full-length journal article. See, Snyder, A. B. and Uysal, V. Ş.,‘Journeys through deathscapes in the contemporary city: exploring urban interiority in New York City and Istanbul’. Architecture_MPS 32, 1 (2025): 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2025v32i1.001
    To contribute to a larger body of study in interiors and cemetery studies, our analysis focused on a selection of unenterable and enterable cemeteries, including the three Sephardic Shearith remnants featured in my current paper, and there were limited reference to the existence of other “types” and XL scales of burial such as potter’s fields because these, too, exist in both cities. Yet, this new discussion on the internal and peripheral “types” offer a very different and more in depth narratives about how the composition of the NYC cemetery, their place in the history of city development, and the potential relationships to unearthing multiple readings of fiction, myth and memory are all new, as are the associated figures. 
11.  Originally written in French in 1967, he speaks to the era. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: utopias and heterotopias,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continute, (October 1984), 5.
12.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1959) Chapter 1, 20. 
13.  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 1981).
14.  Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Towards Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
15.  Clark Moustakas, Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications (Sage, 1990).
16.  I wish to thank Renshan Cao who has deftly assisted with developing graphics for the paper’s content. And, I express gratitude to the School of Design dean’s office, for providing graduate research assistance.