It is amazing how the randomest of wanderings can lead you to the coolest of places and most fascinating people. There I am walking down 2nd Avenue on Sunday. The Bradford Pears had burst forth in all their white-blossomed beauty Saturday and, as if synchronistically timed, the New Yorkers burst out of their tiny-apartments. Streets were full of wanderers; cafes with walls and windows opened to the spring air overflowed with people eating and drinking in the 70 degree day; college girls scurried through stores searching for this year’s perfect sundress. Personally, I was on an aimless, meandering mission to purchase a handful of things for my upcoming eastern Europe excursion; if I happened to see them. Mostly it was just an excuse to walk in the sunshine. I was four steps past a three foot wide crack between two buildings with an iron gate that was opened and a sign above that read New York Marble Cemetery when I stopped and looked back. I really can’t tell you what made me look over my shoulder at the oddly named entryway but curiosity caught me. “They bury marble there? Dig it up? What? What exactly was a Marble Cemetery?”
I turned to retrace my steps and walk through the iron gate. I guess what had caught my attention, without even knowing it, was not what was there, but what wasn’t. The walkway on the other side of the gate went on for about ten feet then opened into a half an acre of greenspace. No building, no park, no construction cranes; just a beautiful green open field, sprinkled with wild flowers, a few bushes, and a lovely blooming dogwood tree. If you’ve walked as many Manhattan streets as I have or spent any part of your life living in this great city, you understand undesigned green spaces simply do not exist here. Wow – what a find on a beautiful spring day.
Walking along the green grass, past the blooming dogwood, I followed the bare hint of a trail marked by human feet, gazing at the marble wall in varying degrees from intact to fallen, much of it crumbled in pieces or repaired in places. There were large square stones, polished smooth, and inset into the wall three-high, one above the other, with about a foot between each. In the center of each stone was carved the word VAULT in large letters. Above, in smaller letters, was a person’s name and below a number. I had seen a vault grave site once in LA, Marilyn Monroe’s in fact, but peering at the crevices left by the empty stones and the width of the wall that I could clearly gauge from the crumbled sections, it was obvious there were no bodies behind these stones. There wasn’t room for even a crevice to hold an urn. I was confused.
I turned around to see a lady with two of those giant poodles walking through the green space picking up trash. “You wouldn’t by chance know the story of this place would you?” I queried. “I sure do,” she responded. As it happened I had asked a descendent of one of the original vault owners, a trustee of the current board, and the person most likely to break the almost-hundred year burial lapse at the cemetery. For the next hour I listened to a fascinating historical, archeological, cultural, and architectural history of that area of New York and the cemetery in particular from Sophia who herself had clearly lived an interesting life as a lawyer, architectural history graduate, and now protectorate of this simple slice of hallowed green in the midst of Manhattan.
The New York Marble Cemetery, she explained, is the oldest non-sectarian burying ground in Manhattan that was open to the public. It was developed in 1830 after legislation was passed disallowing earthen burial on the island. There was fear at the time that ground burials (i.e. one person to one grave) could contribute to contaminants entering the ground water. Instead of graves with individual stones, small rooms were built of solid marble ten feet underground off access shafts. We were essentially standing on the sod roof of a multi-roomed, one story building. I was fascinated as she explained the architectural elements I would have never noticed, such as the plaques that were placed one a foot above the other to symbolize steps and separated to symbolize columns creating, to the trained eye, the sense of a Greek temple. She pointed out the many ways that the pre-Jacksonian, non-individualistic society was represented including the unnamed graves and the vault markers where the word VAULT was clearly more important than the vault-owner’s name in small script above. As she talked on about history and symbolism, I couldn’t help but envy her knowledge. We shared personal stories as well. Talking about my choice to go overseas despite my son’s expressed disapproval, and her choice to stay in New York given her son’s, and how the different paths had still led us to seemingly right places. When we realized we were also both attorneys, I found an empathetic ear to vent to about the contract attorney industry in New York – “why you’re less important than the lint under the water cooler as any of them care!” she exclaimed. How sadly right she was. Our conversation meandered as did our path as we made our way to the table I had not seen before where there were brochures and pictures recanting the history of the cemetery.
As we stood talking across the table in the bright sunlight of the day, a subtly though obviously wealthy man with a South American beauty entered our conversation. He must have had developer ties or been one himself for he resembled a piranha nearing a bleeding hand in its tank as he quizzed Sophia on the land, its owners, and the forays others had made into acquiring it. I delighted in watching her no nonsense way of simply repelling his drooling inquiries. “Yep, I’m sure it would make a great park but it never will be.” “Sure the hotel wants to open it to their guests, but it is not a place for music, it is a place for contemplation.” She was forthright, unapologetic, and absolute. This land had its purpose and would remain devoted to that purpose. I have no doubt he headed straight home and started googling for information on the place. He probably spent half the day figuring out what she told him in the first place – despite many efforts, it hadn’t been taken over in nearly two hundred years and it sure wasn’t going to be on her watch.
Tiring of his unconcealed opportunistic greed, I interrupted the drooling piranha to say my thanks to Sophia. She and I exchanged cards and a promise to continue our conversation over dinner. As I walked away, I took some secret satisfaction in knowing this little plot of land was here in the midst of the East Village, defying time and money and the powers-that-be to remain an empty space, a space in time; a place where the old and new meet beneath an open sky and dream of a tomorrow where some things remain just as they were yesterday.
The New York Marble Cemetery is open April thru November every fourth Sunday from 11am to 3pm. They have a website at www.marblecemetery.org with information on the cemetery’s history as well as the 2,000 some persons buried there since 1830.
'bout time you started writing again.
Well done.
jsg
Posted by: jerry | April 25, 2007 at 11:49 AM