New York Marble Cemetery

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The New York Marble Cemetery (0.5 acres) is a cemetery located in the interior of the block bound by East 2nd and 3rd Streets, Second Avenue, and the Bowery in the East Village, Manhattan, New York City. It should not be confused with the nearby New York City Marble Cemetery which is entirely separate and established one year later.

The cemetery property was purchased on July 13, 1830, as a commercial undertaking of Perkins Nichols, and is the city's oldest nonsectarian cemetery. It was built on what was then the northern edge of residential development, in compliance with recent public health legislation which had outlawed earthen burials. It is entered from Second Avenue through a narrow passageway with iron gate. The grounds contain 156 underground family vaults the size of small rooms, made of Tuckahoe marble, without monuments, laid out in a grid of six columns by 26 rows.

Access to each pair of barrel vaults is by the removal of a stone slab set well below the grade of the lawn. Marble tablets mounted in the long north and south walls give the names of the original vault owners - though not the names of burials - and indicate the precise location of each corresponding underground vault.

The cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a New York City Landmark. Some 2100 burials are recorded in the Cemetery's written registers, most from prominent professional and merchant families in New York City. Notable burials include those for American art patron Luman Reed, Whig mayor Aaron Clark, Congressman and NYU President James Tallmadge, and Benjamin Wright, Chief Engineer for the Erie Canal.67.142.130.11 14:18, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References

  • Matthew A. Postal, Andrew S. Dolkart, Guide to New York City Landmarks, New York (N.Y.). Landmarks Preservation Commission, John Wiley and Sons, 2003, page 56. ISBN 0471369004.
  • Charles Burr Todd, In Olde New York: Sketches of Old Times and Places in Both the State and the City, New York : The Grafton Press, 1907, page 29.
  • Find-A-Grave
  • New York Marble Cemetery
  • Anne Wright Brown, New York Marble Cemetery Interments, 1830-1937, Rhinebeck: Kinship Press, 1999. ISBN 1-56012-157-2.
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