Life Storage

At St. Michael’s, small graves sit in view of Home Depot. The triangular cemetery rests in the middle of a highway interchange, bounded on all three sides by humming roads that cordon its hills off from a sunbaked world of outlet stores and cheap motels. In the children’s section, headstones press up against the fence and sit crooked on ground disturbed by tree roots. The dead are mourned in different languages. Our baby died 1951. Unser liebes kind May–June 1937. Nuestro inolvidable hijo 1933–1937.

Across a small path are the cemetery’s two most famous residents: the composer Scott Joplin and the inventor Granville T. Woods. Both black men working around the turn of the century, they died impoverished despite their success and were buried in unmarked graves—Woods in a coffin shared with two infants and another adult, Joplin with another adult man and a teenage girl—where they lay in anonymity until the historian and collector Middleton Harris had plaques placed over their burial sites in the 1970s. David L. Head, a historian, author, and former MTA bus driver who has worked for decades to promote Woods’s legacy, told a local newspaper that he knelt and wept when he saw the grave for the first time.

St. Michael’s, in northern Queens, is most familiar to outsiders as a place that you drive by on the way to LaGuardia Airport, about six blocks away. Walking to the cemetery from the bus stop requires crossing several highway off-ramps without traffic lights and picking your way down a dirt path by the side of Astoria Boulevard wide enough for only one person. In April cherry blossoms from behind the fence blow into the road and get run over by cars. 

Next to the cemetery, across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), is the Bulova Corporate Center, a fascistic slab of limestone that was once the headquarters of the Bulova Watch Company and now offers its bizarrely ornate and serene indoor plaza—with classical statuary, fountains, and tubular glass elevators—to employees of New York’s Department of Corrections, which has been headquartered there since 2009 due to its proximity to Rikers Island. To enter the building, DOC staff pass by two murals from the 1950s depicting strapping nude men working on timekeeping technologies throughout the ages: precison-cutting quartz crystal, lifting a large hourglass, aligning a sundial presided over by Ra.

St. Michael’s is old, built in the mid-1800s during a rush to create “rural cemeteries” in what would become the outer boroughs, but still active, with a crematorium and ten mausoleums. Most of the graves are arranged in roughly time-bounded sections. A scattered collection of small nineteenth-century headstones adorned with ceramic portraits of black and Latino people abuts a hulking blue Amazon warehouse, its arrow smile leering through a chain link perimeter. Nearby are more recent rows of large, shining gravestones bearing Chinese and Vietnamese names, dotted with offerings of cups of tea and Styrofoam plates holding apples and clementines.

Though the cemetery sits at the intersection of several Queens neighborhoods—Astoria, Jackson Heights, Woodside—most consider it to be in East Elmhurst, a middle-class residential area with detached houses that has a sense of peaceful stasis despite the noise from planes roaring overhead. A study in 2011 found that residents in one census tract there, on average, had lived in their homes longer than those in any other tract in the city. (Rikers Island is also directly in LaGuardia’s flight path, but the prison was excluded from a noise mitigation program in the mid-2010s because it was considered “not residential.”)

St. Michael’s has maintained essentially the same dimensions since the late nineteenth century, but since 2013 it has been looking for room to grow. That year, it attempted to buy an adjacent then-abandoned park at the tip of its triangular island—an area of four acres that sits inside the fork of the BQE—which the Parks Department had designed to serve as a buffer between the cemetery and the road. The deal fell through even though city officials were in favor of the project; Parks said it would be necessary to identify a different parcel of land to replace the lost green space, which proved impossible. The space shortage means that “the cost of a local funeral is very high,” Assemblymember Aravella Simotas told a local paper, and residents are at risk of “being priced out of a burial in their own community.”

By “their own community” she might have meant New York, given that room for traditional burial anywhere in the city is running low, though cemetery directors keep finding ingenious new corners to stow people. Most New Yorkers, for that matter, haven’t been buried in their immediate communities for close to two hundred years. St. Michael’s and other rural cemeteries were created to whisk the dead away from the city proper during a moment of panic over exponential urban growth. It’s never been easy to maintain graves here, with space in such short supply. The city piles on. Those whose names remain in stone are the ones whose heirs could pay, or those, like Joplin and Woods, who found a vigorous champion—even generations later.

1.

For centuries, what is now northwest Queens was swampland. It was once a hunting ground for the Mespeatches Lenape, who called it Wandownock, or “fine land between the long streams,” meaning the East River and Flushing Bay. The most comprehensive account of the area’s early history is The Annals of Newtown, a haughty 1852 tome by James Riker Jr., a descendent of the Dutch colonist who gave Rikers Island its name. Dutch and English farmers had settled on the land by the 1640s, but so few they could be easily listed—Hans the Boore, Henry the Farmer, Burger Jorissen.

In 1642 New Amsterdam’s bloodthirsty director, Willem Kieft, granted a patent for an enormous tract of land in a place the Lenape called Mespat—today Maspeth—to an English Puritan reverend and his followers. But the next year Kieft ordered massacres of two native villages elsewhere in the colony while families slept, provoking reprisals that forced Mespat’s settlers to flee. “And thus declined the ancient municipality of Mespat whose origin had beamed with promise,” wrote Riker. Some settlers hung on around the coasts. “For years the hum of industry and the marks of civilization were confined to its marine borders, while the interior maintained all the grandeur of a wild unbroken wilderness.” 

The first Riker in New York, Abraham Rycken, moved to this region of scattered “out-plantations,” near the present-day site of St. Michael’s, in 1654. His descendants remained on the land for generations. (One was Richard Riker, the first district attorney of New York County, who became notorious for sending free black New Yorkers to slavery in the South with dubious evidence under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Abolitionists referred to him as a member of the “New York Kidnapping Club.”) 

Two years before Rycken’s arrival, English settlers had returned to Mespat and formed the town of Middelburg, later Newtown. They did so with the permission of Peter Stuyvesant, another irascible and brutal director of the colony, but when he failed to offer them a legal patent of incorporation, they turned to purchasing the land from the Lenape. They entered into negotiations with men named Rowerowestco and Pomwaukon, according to Riker’s account, eventually securing a deed that read in part: “We the said Indians…do really and absolutely give them and their heirs for ever, as full right and title to all the privileges of the said tract of land…denying ourselves of any interest therein.” They signed with an X.  

For around two hundred years Newtown was dominated by large rural estates. Between 1790 and 1830 it added only a modest 499 people to its population, while in the same period Manhattan was exploding, growing from about 60,000 inhabitants in 1800 to more than 200,000 by 1830. Terrifying yellow fever outbreaks ravaged the city almost annually around the turn of the nineteenth century: 4 percent of Manhattan’s population died in the 1798 epidemic. Cholera became a serious issue several decades later. 

The dead had always been kept close at hand, in churchyards and home burial grounds. Prior to urbanization, burials were usually “an intimate affair” carried out by “a close circle of relations,” writes the scholar Gary Laderman, but in the city “a range of interested parties and impersonal forces began to converge on the dead and alter the details of their exit from society.”¹ The epidemics created a horror of the rapidly accumulating bodies, and the sense that death was unmanageable at the new urban scale. A doctor writing a report for the New York Board of Health in 1806 decried the “vast mass of decaying animal matter…now deposited in many of the most populous parts of the city.” The worry was that churchyards were emitting sickening miasmas, which made observational if not scientific sense; in a time before embalming, shallow graves sometimes gave off concerning odors. In 1822, during a yellow fever outbreak, the stench was such that several workers covering Trinity churchyard with quicklime began vomiting. The city’s Common Council banned burials south of Canal Street the next year.

In 1847, to encourage the creation of burial grounds outside of Manhattan, the state passed the Rural Cemetery Act, authorizing private institutions to open tax-exempt graveyards in underdeveloped areas. The drive to stake out territory for the deceased intensified in 1851, when the living claimed exclusive domain over all the land south of 86th Street and the legislature banned the creation of new cemeteries anywhere on the island of Manhattan. Newtown, with its sparse population yet reasonable proximity to the city via ferry, soon became the center of a cemetery boom. Mount Olivet, Lutheran, Cypress Hills, Evergreens, Calvary, and St. Michael’s cemeteries were established there between 1848 and 1852.

The advantages of rural cemeteries were manifold: keeping the dead out from underfoot seemed more sanitary, and also freed up valuable land for development. As large green spaces, cemeteries could provide fresh air and some of the supposed benefits of lost pastoral life, such as moral instruction from nature. In answer to anyone concerned that it might be blasphemous to bury their loved ones away from a church, proponents of rural cemeteries argued that the chaos of urban life was not conducive to holiness. The living needed to be protected from the urban dead, but so did the dead from the urban living. “Why should we expose our burying grounds to the broad glare of day, to the unfeeling gaze of the idler, to the noisy press of business, to the discordant shouts of merriment, or to the baleful visitations of the dissolute?” asked Supreme Court justice Joseph Story at the consecration ceremony for what is considered to be America’s first rural cemetery, Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In New York, rural cemeteries promised to provide a refuge from the rapid turnover in Manhattan, and helped make historical preservation possible at the same time that Americans became interested in enshrining a national past. “Communities searching for a local history,” as the scholar David Charles Sloane argues, “used the rural cemetery as a repository and a shrine.”² Cemetery associations began honoring veterans and local luminaries.

The rise of rural cemeteries also reflected a shift in the meaning of death itself. As Protestants moved away from strict Calvinism to a more hopeful belief in the possibility of avoiding hellfire through faith and good works, they started inclining toward a more sentimental, Romantic iconography of death and burial. “Cemeteries”—etymologically “places of sleep”—distinguished themselves from the earlier, more literal “burial grounds” or “graveyards.” Graves were no longer adorned with Puritanical memento mori meant to harangue the living into piety. Grinning skulls and epitaphs invoking worms and dust were replaced with pleasant symbols of eternal life—angels, ivy for permanence. Acorns could signify resurrection and the rewards of patient faith, the journey from seed to tree representing both gradual change and profound transformation.

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In the early 1850s Thomas McClure Peters, rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on West 99th Street, grew concerned about the future of internment for his congregants. The church’s backyard burial ground had become crowded, and securing a spot was a matter of some contention. More urgently, a small graveyard attached to a nearby mission church that Peters had founded in the African American community of Seneca Village was being forced to stop accepting burials because it was just below 86th Street.³

Peters resolved to secure a permanent resting place not just for the residents of Seneca Village and the future departed of the St. Michael’s congregation, but for all the city’s dead with nowhere to go. This was a more radical idea than it might seem today. In Paris at the time, as the art historian T.J. Clark has noted, individual burials were seen as a bourgeois luxury; between 1839 and 1847, 78 percent of Parisians were buried in a common grave, and even those buried in cemeteries were usually only interred for a few years and then moved to a charnel house. But in New York potter’s fields became ever more stigmatized as they swelled with the ranks of epidemic victims and the immigrant poor. The city shuttled them out of sight, first to Randall’s Island in the 1840s and then to Wards Island in the 1850s.

Avoiding a pauper’s grave had become a common anxiety for New Yorkers, and Peters was convinced that assuaging this terror and offering an “orderly burial” was one of the most important comforts he could provide to the dying and their families. “There are persons who esteem the burial of the dead an unnecessary charity, inasmuch as the Potter’s Field is open to all,” Peters wrote in 1874 in a paper for the City Mission Society. “Let such go with our visitors to the homes of the poor, to the bedside of the sick in the hospitals, and they will learn that next to the dread of the pains of hell is horror at the thought that the church might have no grave for them.” 

The best option, a seven-acre field within range of the Astoria Ferry, cost about ten times what he had hoped to spend. “The sum required to be paid down exceeded all my worldly possessions,” Peters wrote. Eventually, with loans from friends, he scraped together enough money to buy the land, which had once been owned by the Riker family, in 1852. There he founded St. Michael’s Cemetery.

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Throughout the city, bodies were on the move. Graveyards were irresistible to speculators hoping to subdivide them into building lots; churches, struggling with debt or maintenance costs, were often willing to sell. Amity Street Burial Ground in Greenwich Village, purchased for $2,000 by one of Manhattan’s earliest Baptist congregations in 1814, was worth $300,000 by the time it was sold to developers in 1863, although it required the reinterment of about 1,200 bodies. “Mammon, with a covetous eye, lays his plans for invading and turning to business purposes those hallowed spots heretofore sanctified to the memory of our deceased friends,” wrote the Times, covering the sale.

On top of the overcrowding problem, the original churchyard of St. Michael’s was disrupted by the building of roads. According to a 1907 history of the church written by a subsequent rector, while Broadway was being laid out in the 1870s the neighborhood—Bloomingdale, today a section of the Upper West Side—was “in an almost indescribable condition of upheaval and destruction.” The frantic pace of development caused a disorientation similar to the feverish haze that descended on the city in the form of another round of mosquito-borne illness, “supposed to be due to the continual tearing up of the land.” In 1872, to make way for the creation of Tenth Avenue and the installation of pipes for the city’s first major water supply system, the vestry reinterred “six boxes of bones” from both Manhattan graveyards affiliated with St. Michael’s to the new cemetery in Queens. The church issued a notice in The New York Herald to inform any possible relatives about unclaimed remains that were going to be moved, among them those of Anne W.C. Froup (age forty-eight), Rich’d S. Ritchie (twenty-four), and John Cinnamon (thirty-three).

They joined tens of thousands of other inconveniently placed souls from around the city on a journey to Queens, or the Brooklyn–Queens border. St. Michael’s, though sizeable, was smaller than many of the other rural cemeteries that had been built in Newtown after the passage of the Rural Cemetery Act: by 1898 there were 42,000 bodies interned there—paltry compared to Calvary’s 645,738.

Rural cemeteries were meant to herald a new age of equality—they were open to the public, and, because their promoters were usually reformers who supported abolition, were often integrated, in contrast to most churchyards. (Trinity, for example, took over the city’s primary public burial grounds in the seventeenth century after New Amsterdam’s handoff to the British and immediately forbade the burial of black people there.) But at the same time they heightened class differences: the wealthy rode carriages to ornate mausoleums built on family lots while the poor walked to visit relatives buried in single graves with simple markers, often separated from other family members. Frederick Law Olmsted despaired of the incursion of the city’s ills into what “should, above all things, be a place of rest, silence, seclusion, and peace,” but was “too often now made a place not only of the grossest ostentation of the living but a constant resort of mere pleasure seekers, travellers, promenaders, and loungers.”

The city’s emerging cemetery capital had particular trouble with these visiting promenaders. In 1897 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described Newtown residents going to Albany to complain of being “badly…afflicted with cemeteries.” The town lacked control over much of its land, which made it difficult to manage its suddenly booming tourist economy: one seventh of its territory was now untaxable, and the revenue from a hard-fought bill instituting a $1 tax on each body brought into Queens had to be spent on road maintenance, which was mostly needed due to “the hundreds of coaches that trundled into the town daily.” The town’s living population was 28,000; the dead, fantastically, numbered 1,700,000. “There are more dead people in Newtown than in any other town or city of its size in the world, but it is a distinction that Newtown does not brag of.”

Life was strange in a town in the grief industry, the Eagle reported. The streets were lined with marble yards, florists, and hotels that served lunch to mourners: “Sweitzer cheese, ham, potcheese, and a small pot of coffee” for 25 cents. The neighborhood was crowded at 5:00 PM and deserted by 8:00, at which time “these places themselves assume a funereal aspect.”

Not all graves were moved out of Manhattan. Many were built over: forgotten, ignored, or intentionally let be, like the 20,000 bodies buried, probably to this day, under Washington Square Park. The city’s Common Council indicated that it would protect the bodies there from being disturbed by using the area, which had been the city’s primary potter’s field, as a public parade ground rather than allowing it to be sold to developers.

This public largesse was because some of the bodies there were connected with “our most respectable families”—prominent citizens who had only been interred in a potter’s field because they had died of yellow fever. Not all the dead were afforded the same concern. During surveying before the construction of a federal office building near City Hall in 1991, archaeologists discovered the remains of more than 15,000 black people, both free and enslaved, left behind when a segregated burial ground was divided into lots in 1759 and built over (the fact that it was in an uneven area that was levelled with landfill protected many of the bodies). Most people were buried with their heads pointing west, to face the rising sun in the next life; 40 percent of the dead were children under twelve, and many people had serious or fatal injuries related to overwork. Today the site is commemorated as a national monument, marked by a polished structure as tall as the graves were deep.

2.

Granville T. Woods was born in Ohio around the time St. Michael’s was founded, in 1856. He later told people that he was an aboriginal Australian “to offset the racial hatred against blacks,” David L. Head, the leading researcher into Woods’s life and advocate for his memory, told me. Woods apprenticed in a machinist’s shop when he was ten and likely attended some technical school. He worked on railways and became interested in telegraphs, and invented a system to improve communication between trains, which had a tendency to crash headlong into each other if it was foggy or the watchman nodded off. 

Short on funds—Jim Crow was spreading across the country, making it difficult to find work—and weakened by smallpox, Woods was delayed in developing his invention. He worked for a time in a mill, and, displaying the combative bravery that characterized his life, sued his employer when they withheld his wages. By the time he was ready to file for a patent, he had to win an “interference” case in court against another inventor, a business partner of Thomas Edison, who was pursuing a similar device. 

He won that case, and then another of his patents was bought for a sizeable sum by the American Bell Telephone Company, but he often struggled to capitalize on his inventions, regularly going into debt or signing away the rights in advance in order to afford the patent process in the first place. In 1890 he left Cincinnati for New York—“the center of electrical activity in the United States in the late nineteenth century,” as the communications scholar and Woods biographer Rayvon Fouché describes it.⁴ Lacking contacts, he went into business with a white man named James Zerbe on the basis of a newspaper ad, which turned out to be calamitous. “He was a scoundrel,” Head told me.

Woods started working on an electric railway system. Seeing the project’s value, Zerbe tried to pressure him to sign away his rights to the company they had cofounded, then stole his design when Woods tried to end their partnership. As Woods testified in one of the many patent interference cases he underwent—records of which provide much of the surviving information about his life—“he at once admitted the theft and stated that he was much obliged to me for leaving the drawings where he could take them and copy them.” When Woods protested, Zerbe hit him on the back of the head. Woods struck back, and Zerbe’s son jumped on his back and choked him until a janitor in the hallway, hearing the noise, ran in and separated them.

Woods ultimately won a protracted legal battle against Zerbe, but by the time he was able to reapply for a patent in 1895, new interference cases had arisen with other inventors, and important aspects of his creation were excluded from the patent he ultimately received. Nonetheless, the case seems to have brought him some useful publicity, and he went on to patent twenty-two other creations, mostly for General Electric and Westinghouse. “A few years after the turn-of-the-century Woods had become a part of the dominant technological and inventive culture’s apparatus,” writes Fouché. Despite this recognition and success, Woods was destitute following a period of illness when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1910, at the age of fifty-three. He was going to be buried in a potter’s field, but friends in Upper Manhattan, near St. Michael’s Church, secured an unmarked, shared plot for him in the congregation’s Queens cemetery.

It would be more than half a century before Middleton Harris recovered Woods’s name.⁵ “A crowd of schoolchildren, city officials and a black historian walked through gravestones set willy-nilly in St. Michael’s cemetery in Elmhurst, Queens, yesterday,” reads a 1975 Times article on the unveiling of his new gravestone, “crushing spring periwinkle and wild chives underfoot, to the unmarked grave of an unsung black inventor.”

Head has continued this work. He decided to write a book about black transportation pioneers after joining the black history committee of his local Transport Workers Union in 1991, which led him to carry out years of research on Woods. A spiritual man, Head told me that he felt guided in this work by Woods himself, and experiences a profound connection to him through time. “When I speak about Granville T. Woods, I feel that I am him,” he said. “I am a living extension of him today.” He published a book on Woods in 2013,⁶ and he has pushed the city to honor him in myriad ways, having his name affixed to a Brooklyn elementary school and a street in Coney Island, getting four million MetroCards printed with Woods’s face, and securing public recognition from institutions like the Brooklyn Public Library and the New York City Transit Museum for his contribution to the invention of the third rail. (Head and Fouché disagree about how central Woods was to its development.) “The third rail is the heartbeat of New York,” Head said in 2023, at a celebration of Woods’s life that St. Michael’s hosts every spring. “When it shuts down, the city shuts down.”

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When I attended that year’s celebration it was raining. The crowd gathered in a chapel, which felt particularly sepulchral due to the sheets of rain visible through the open doorway. “It’s always a sunny day at St. Michael’s, no matter what’s going on outside,” said Tony Barsamian, publisher of the Queens Gazette, who was presiding over the event. 

Head told the audience about the journey that had led him to Woods, then asked his wife to bring a portable TV screen to the front of the chapel while he briefly disappeared into the next room. She played an old video of schoolchildren from PS 335, or The Granville T. Woods School, singing in unison: “Granville T., we love you, yes we do.” Soon Head returned in nineteenth-century clothing: a voluminous white shirt and a bow around his neck. He told the story of Woods’s life in the first person—reenacting Zerbe and his son’s attack on Woods, he mimed an arm around his neck wrenching him to the ground, gasping as if he still felt it. At the end of the presentation, Barsamian led a round of applause. “Big thanks to two people: Granville T. Woods, and”—Head took off his hat and took a bow—“David Head.”

The Peacherine Ragtime Society Orchestra began to tune. Their conductor explained that some people had thought that “ragged time,” the heavily syncopated musical style spread around the country to enthusiastic audiences by roving pianists like Scott Joplin, would cause “the decline of Western civilization.” It was black music, and its swinging beat was thought to be too sensuous and stimulating for young white crowds.

The orchestra played several of Joplin’s tripping, intricate compositions, some of which are among the most well-known in the American repertoire. (Ghostly versions of “The Entertainer” leak from ice cream trucks every summer.) Then a singer in period dress came onstage and sang a collection of novelty songs, including “Fido Is A Hot Dog Now”—“a big hit in 1914!”—and a song about trying to romance a girl when your Model T keeps breaking down. He led the mostly white crowd in a round of “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The cheer of these ambassadors from the world of flat top hats jarred with the memory of the forces arrayed against Woods and Joplin. The son of an enslaved man, Joplin had spent most of his money trying to produce his opera Treemonisha—a story of black self-empowerment set on a former plantation in Joplin’s native Texas—before dying of syphilis in an asylum on Wards Island. 

Today Head lives in Michigan. He is working on a screenplay about Woods, as well as, among other projects, securing a historical marker for Cornelius Langston Henderson, an engineer who helped build the Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit to Windsor, Canada. “We’re not a footnote, we’re a keynote,” Head told me. “At the cornerstone of American existence is an African man, woman, and child. We did the work, and nothing gets done without work. Don’t leave that out.” 

3.

Newtown ceased to exist as an independent town in 1898, when it became a ward of the newly created borough of Queens. The next year a plan for the building of the Queensboro bridge was unveiled, kicking off a period of frantic land speculation in an area that was still rural. Around the same time, the developer Cord Meyer began subdividing a farm he owned in Newtown, calling his development “Elmhurst” to avoid any association with the polluted Newtown Creek.

Soon after, the Bankers’ Land and Mortgage Corporation developed a tract of two thousand strictly residential lots by Flushing Bay that it called East Elmhurst. The Queensboro Corporation bought millions of dollars worth of farmland and began developing it into low-density apartment complexes built on the “garden city model”—voilà, Jackson Heights. The compositions of these neighborhoods would be shaped for decades by the developers’ decisions about whether to institute racial covenants banning black people and Jews from moving in; East Elmhurst and Corona were integrated, with black families living alongside Irish, Italian, and German immigrants, while Elmhurst and Jackson Heights largely were not.

East Elmhurst soon attracted an affluent black community of homeowners, including Ella Fitzgerald and Harry Belafonte. Other working- and middle-class black people were drawn there and to Corona by the relatively integrated schools, or moved there to escape the increasing “ghettoization” of other black neighborhoods during the 1950s. As Steven Gregory writes in Black Corona,⁷ residents were connected by a strong local activist network fostered at churches and the NAACP, which organized against hiring and job assignment discrimination by the Works Progress Administration as it sought workers to clear ground for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing and to build LaGuardia Airport.⁸

The Grand Central Parkway extension that runs alongside St. Michael’s was built around the same time as the airport, one among a number of roads Robert Moses constructed to ensure that residents from all over the metro area could pour into the parks he had created in Long Island. In 1936 he completed the Triborough Bridge to link the Bronx and Manhattan to Queens, and then in turn to his Long Island parkways. But there was a four-mile gap between the existing Grand Central Parkway and the bridge, filled with “neat one-family homes, garden apartments, stores and small factories,” writes Robert Caro in The Power Broker. When it proved too expensive to purchase and condemn it all, Moses instead clogged the periphery of Flushing Bay with sand and stone and built half of the missing road on landfill. As Caro puts it, the point was to let drivers motor from the bridge directly to Long Island “on modern parkways on which they would not be delayed by a single traffic light or intersection.” St. Michael’s would be just a blur as you drove by.

Just across Astoria Boulevard, to the north, businesses had to be picked up and pushed back to accommodate the new highway, including Donhauser Florist, which was founded in 1889 by a German immigrant who noticed the cemetery had created an appetite for flowers. “There was a time when you could’ve walked from here straight across to St. Michael’s Cemetery,” one of the elderly owners told a local paper in 2014. “There was no Grand Central Parkway and the horse and delivery wagon would go straight across.”

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Moses wasn’t fussy about cemeteries. As parks commissioner in the 1930s, he oversaw the construction of Martins Field Playground on Parks Department land that had once been the town of Flushing’s pauper’s cemetery, where there may be more than a thousand people buried—mostly black and Native American people, as well as some white victims of epidemics. The site’s prior use was not a mystery: a local paper celebrated the changing of its name to Martins Field from “Paupers’ Burial Ground.” Sure enough, during construction of the playground, numerous bodies were unearthed; there were no known efforts to reinter them. Another article reported WPA workers digging up “bones galore” and stealing pennies that they found resting on the eyes of the dead. The city finally commemorated the site in 2006 thanks to the efforts of Mandingo Osceola Tshaka, a community activist who traced his ancestry to one of the families interred there, the Bunns. Ralph Bunn, another descendant, explained to an archeologist doing a report that “his culture has an insult involving ‘dancing and playing’ on the graves of the ancestors. However, the insult is just words, at Martins Field he finds it an offensive reality.”

The fate of the Paupers’ Burial Ground suggests how little protection burial places enjoyed during the Moses era if they were out of active use. When the city wished to reappropriate public land that housed graves, it simply posted notices in local newspapers informing any interested parties that they should reinter their relatives before a certain date if they wished (and if they had the funds). In the case of Martins Field, the city does not even appear to have done that.

Rural cemeteries, in contrast, which were incorporated and run by boards of trustees, had been carefully regulated ever since the passing of the Rural Cemetery Act, which prohibited any road construction that would disturb them without the agreement of the cemetery’s board, or absent that, special approval by the state. This sometimes happened: in 1966 the state legislature gave the city permission to cut through New Calvary and Mt. Zion cemeteries in Woodside to reduce persistent traffic at the Moses-conceived interchange of the Long Island Expressway and the BQE. But when it came to St. Michael’s, directly in the path of the BQE, planners decided to simply dart around either side, turning it into a true island in 1954.

The one-mile stretch on either side of the cemetery was one of the first sections of the BQE completed in Queens, but elsewhere in the borough construction was slow—after beginning in 1941, it stretched on for more than twenty years. Homes and businesses had been condemned and residents moved out of Woodside, to the south, but engineering difficulties (the discovery of an underground lake, for example) and labor shortages during World War II caused the area to sit abandoned for months, attracting vagrants and occasionally catching fire. The local press took to calling the project “The Road to Nowhere.”

As a result, the initial arm of the BQE built to the west of St. Michael’s saw only light traffic for years, and so the community made their own use of it. Roger Raymond Sciole, a man sitting next to me at the Granville T. Woods event, told me that, in the 1960s, the road was one of the epicenters of New York City street racing. People came from Nassau County to watch, he said, until the cops came by to shut it down around 3:00 or 4:00 AM. “A lot of guys used to bring their chicks to the Connecting Highway to watch the races and make out between runs,” a muscle car aficionado named Joe Oldham wrote in his 2007 memoir. “And there was always a plethora of babes there on their own, looking to pick up guys. This was something the serious racers had to put up with.”

Sciole grew up in the area in the 1950s, the son of a construction worker who had helped build the airport. Kids would hang out in hyperlocal street gangs, he told me; his group would go to the cemetery to “neck.” Like other people from the neighborhood I spoke to, he remembered visiting the New York 1964–1965 World’s Fair. At seventeen he befriended a worker who would let him into the Fair to look at Michaelangelo’s Pietà, on loan from the Vatican as a result of one of Robert Moses’s only comparatively minor schemes (there’s an entire book written on the subject). “I spent hours behind the glass looking at the statue,” he said. Today he is an artist. He showed me a photo of a moose head he found on the street and included in an assemblage: “I believe objects are important,” he told me. “Long after their function is gone there are other things you perceive in them.”

*

The anarchical fog that descended on New York during and after the 1970s fiscal crisis did not spare cemeteries. In the face of inflation, St. Michael’s struggled to keep up with the cost of maintaining aging, crowded gravestones, many of which had no perpetual care fees. Graves sank or were overgrown by weeds, pheasants wandered through the tall grass, and vandals overturned headstones and smashed the stained glass of the crematorium after the cemetery was forced to cut its security budget. “The public might accept some blame for the deterioration themselves,” noted the Daily News in a 1974 article on the sorry state of the place. “They rarely visit their dead nowadays.”

There were strange, malicious acts. On one occasion teens stole a woman’s skull from a crypt—to sell to practitioners of black magic, local news reports suspected. “We are informed that a good skull can bring as much as $500,” said a spokesman for the Queens DA, after a different grave robbing at New Calvary Cemetery by what law enforcement suspected was the same gang. The problem of vandalism remained severe in the 1980s—people were riding motorcycles through gaps in the fence and occasionally defecating on graves—though conditions began to improve after a large renovation in the 1990s.

Still, chaotic forces pressed in from all directions. In 1991 teens managed to overturn seven hundred headstones on a lark. Throughout the late 1990s rottweilers would slip into St. Michael’s through a hole in the fence of an adjacent junkyard that the owner refused to repair, “terrorizing patrons and staff at the cemetery and disrupting funerary services.” Around the same time, a nightclub called Club Phenomenon opened just south of St. Michael’s, after some legal delay—it was initially going to be the borough’s largest topless bar, but the owner didn’t realize that the cemetery, unlike Rikers Island, was zoned as residential, requiring adult entertainment to be built at a distance of five hundred feet. It was shuttered by the police in 2006 after its third fatal shooting and the sale of drugs and sex to undercover cops. Now the space is occupied by a chain called Life Storage. 

Today locals take pride in the cemetery’s appearance and seem enthusiastic about its community programming. At a well-attended tree-planting event in honor of the boxer Emile Griffith, who is buried there, an older man with a strong Queens accent and a shirt commemorating FDNY victims of September 11 praised the cemetery’s practice of placing military flags for every branch of service by the graves of veterans: “You’re the only ones in a million, or maybe a billion, that do that,” he said. “I think it looks nicer than Arlington.”

On the occasions when I visited Granville T. Woods’s burial place, standing there for a few minutes as cars streamed by, his grave marker often looked very small and still to me, flat on the ground near the forgotten children’s section. I would think of the urgency and vivacity of David L. Head’s work, which made the plaque seem in comparison like a staid monument to the effort it takes to recover even one life from oblivion. Still, to claim a few feet of space in New York is a sort of rebellion. I recently asked Head what he thought the purpose of commemorating a burial place was. “A grave marker lets you know, ‘I was here,’” he said.

4.

St. Michael’s has protected the burial places of Woods, Joplin, and thousands more, and there is a growing awareness of the need to commemorate the gravesites of those lost beneath the city’s churn, but elsewhere in the former Newtown even a simple marker still eludes many residents. Construction workers were digging the foundations for an apartment complex in nearby Elmhurst in 2011 when they found a woman’s body, so well preserved that they assumed she was the victim of a recent homicide. But she was wearing nineteenth-century clothing: a long white nightgown, thick knee-high socks, and a woolen cap held in place with a handmade comb. An archaeologist was brought in and noticed scraps of iron around her; the workers had pierced what he recognized as a highly unusual coffin.

The airtight design, hewing close to the body, was made of black iron fashioned to look like a draped shroud. It had a glass oval over the face, like a grim reaper’s diving suit. This reimagined sarcophagus was the invention of the stove designer Almond Dunbar Fisk, made for an era when the advent of steam power enabled family members to live far apart but not to bring their bodies back home intact.

Research revealed that the mummified woman, who became colloquially known as the Iron Coffin Lady, died around 1851 and was named Martha Peterson. She belonged to a family that had long lived in the area—an archaeologist estimated that one tenth of Newtown’s black community were Petersons—and worked as a domestic servant for Fisk’s brother-in-law and business partner. The site had once been home to a Presbyterian church, and its backyard cemetery. The church, which later became African Methodist Episcopal and was renamed St. Mark AME Church in 1906, had been a significant hub of Newtown’s black community: in 1914 Booker T. Washington came to speak at a fundraiser for a new building.

The story is usually told as if the discovery of Peterson’s iron coffin came as a complete surprise, but in fact it had been evident for years that there had likely been a historical churchyard on the site. The burial ground shows up clearly on old maps as “Dutch Lane Cemetery.” In 2007 the street in front was renamed in honor of James Pennington—an abolitionist and orator who had escaped slavery and led an early campaign to desegregate public transportation and who preached at the church in the late 1830s—suggesting that at least someone in the neighborhood remained aware of the history.

The tale of what happened to the church is familiar: as land in Elmhurst became more valuable, its leaders came under pressure to sell. A New York Times article in 1922 alleged that the church’s acre of land had initially been given to the founders (members of the United African Society, an African American benevolent society formed soon after the abolition of slavery in the state) by white residents, and implied it was time to give it back now that it was actually worth something. With valuable frontage on both the main street and the Long Island Railroad, “the business men of the district…would like to see the plot taken over and improved as a business or industrial property for the general benefit of the community.”

In 1928 the widening of Corona Avenue disrupted the burial ground, necessitating the reinterment of twenty people, who were moved to Mount Olivet cemetery in four boxes and buried in graves that remain unmarked to this day. The rest of the people buried at St. Mark, though, remained after the church packed up and moved to North Corona around 1930. By the next year the former church building was listed on a fire insurance map as a screen factory, with no mention of a cemetery, as if it couldn’t be forgotten about fast enough. 

*

Until recently New York was one of only a handful of states with no protections for abandoned burying places on private land. Only in 2023 did Governor Kathy Hochul enact the Unmarked Burial Site Protection Act, which, for the first time, mandated that anyone who discovers an unmarked burial site must report it to officials, and that human remains cannot be defaced or desecrated. Now, if a coroner determines that the bodies are over fifty years old, an archaeological survey must be carried out, and developers need to come to an agreement with any “lineal” or “culturally affiliated” descendants over what should be done before proceeding. If at the end of the negotiation process the descendants wish for the site to be preserved but the developer for the remains to be removed, they will be removed. Hochul, under pressure from the real estate lobby, initially vetoed the bill on the grounds that it unduly threatened property rights, then supported a revised version with a narrowed window of time in which agreements had to be negotiated.

Prior to the act, a similar set of protections could come into play for archaeologically sensitive sites that involved the city, state, or federal government. This was the case for the site of the former Newtown church, essentially by happenstance. In 2005 a developer called AMF Machine was hoping to build a nine-story mixed-use building on the site of St. Mark’s former burial ground, now 47-11 90th Street, and applied to the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals for an exemption from the area’s zoning laws because of the odd shape of the parcel of land. They were given permission, as long as they met with the Landmarks Preservation Commission about doing an archaeological survey—the community board had expressed concern that there was a historical cemetery there that would be disturbed.

The resulting reports found strong documentary evidence for the presence of an African American graveyard, with the possibility that there might be nearly three hundred bodies still interred in it. Researchers dug large pits and trenches but didn’t find any bodies, though they cataloged an impressive accumulation of objects. One pit contained “complete glass bottles, glass bottle fragments, oyster shell, dinner ware…urinal fragment marked Kalamazoo Manf. Co., one spoon, butchered beef bone / scapula, copper gutter, brick.” They recommended further testing.

Perhaps frustrated by the further legal delays, in 2009 AMF Machine sold the lot to 90 Queens Inc., whose president is identified on public records as a local developer named Bo Jin Zhu. After taking over the property, the new company demolished a number of buildings on the site and dug a fourteen-foot-deep trench. It was there that Martha Peterson was found, in an area not surveyed by the previous team, among the bones of others.

Subsequent archaeological work prepared for the developer found that much of of the graveyard had been severely disrupted by construction, likely both in recent years and in the 1940s, when it was occupied by a defense manufacturer called Peerless Instrument Co., though it was possible that there were better preserved bodies in other parts of the lot. Researchers recovered 125 bones from at least nine adults, most of which were scattered and damaged, and fragments of headstones with just partial names and words legible: “…emory of…BAWNS.” The condition of the churchyard made the miracle of Peterson’s wholeness even more apparent; she was so perfectly preserved that her hair “fell over her shoulders.”

*

I first visited 47-11 90th Street in June 2024 with James McMenamin, vice president of the Elmhurst History and Cemetery Preservation Society and a lifelong Elmhurst resident. We walked there together from a coffee shop where he knew everybody, past Tibetan restaurants and Chinese-language driving schools, unfussy brick mid-rise apartments and two-story row houses with the ubiquitous shiny Queens metal railings and aluminum awnings, until we reached an abandoned lot overgrown with weeds and full of junked cars. It is nearly inaccessible from the street, essentially a large backyard abutting Long Island Rail Road tracks; the only entrance is a driveway behind a tire shop and a laundromat. When I walked by, workers sat on the curb smoking cigarettes by an open back door as clouds of steam and the smell of detergent wafted out.

After Martha Peterson was found, McMenamin’s group worked strenuously to have the site landmarked, petitioning congresspeople, city councilpeople, and the borough president. But negotiations between the church and 90 Queens Inc. dragged on, and in 2019 the developer put the lot up for sale. Revered Kimberely Detherage, who has been leading negotiations on behalf of St. Mark, told me that the church came to a signed agreement with the developer and excavations of graves were underway, but in the winter of 2021 the work abruptly stopped, and the developer disappeared. “We negotiated in good faith, and we were never notified of their intentions to stop, never notified of anything,” she said.

Though it has remained mostly vacant since Martha Peterson’s discovery, the land has had an active life as an asset. First it was mortgaged to a crowdfunding investment platform called CrowdFunz that primarily caters to international Chinese clients, then to a New Jersey bank, which sold $6.6 million of its debt to Chris Jiashu Xu, a developer who built what was once Queens’s tallest skyscraper. It is still owned by 90 Queens Inc., accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. This fall the city sold the outstanding tax debt in a lien sale (not for the first time), indicating the possibility of foreclosure if 90 Queens Inc. doesn’t settle its accounts.

The property is currently described on several real estate sites as “pending,” listed for over $7 million, with no mention of any bodies: “EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY FOR A DEVELOPER/INVESTOR TO CAPITALIZE ON THE GROWING DEMAND FOR RESIDENTIAL, RENTAL, AND CONDOMINIUM SPACE.” The Department of Buildings, however, says there is a block on approvals for any construction permits and that the city and state are discussing how the Unmarked Burial Site Protection Act would affect the possibility of any future development projects on the burial ground, as well as on similar sites in the city going forward. Chrysalis Archaeological Consultants, a firm brought in by the historical society, told me over email that the work needed there to comply with the city’s regulations for historical burial sites was “in no way complete.”

This hasn’t prevented the site from being further disturbed. When I visited again in late 2025, it had been paved over, and the number of wrecked cars had proliferated. As I approached the lot, two men got into one of the cars and executed two perfect donuts, revving the powerful engine. The driver told me the lot was being used by several autobody shops, and was surprised to hear it had once been a burial ground. “Wow, that must be why they can’t build anything here,” he said.

“The African American burial ground is sacred ground,” Reverend Detherage told me, and she felt it had been descecrated. Nonetheless, she stressed, the church would continue to fight for landmark status, and for the preservation of Newtown’s black history. “We’ve been presented, as African Americans—even today—as ignorant and inferior, as people who made no contribution to Queens, or to American society,” she said, “and we want to continue to preserve the richness and variety of African American culture through our burial ground, and through the Iron Coffin Lady.”

McMenamin connected me with Dr. Orisade Awodola, one of the descendants of James Pennington, the one-time pastor of the Presbyterian church that later became St. Mark, and with a young man named Noah Humphrey who works on Pennington’s legacy and as a representative of the family, which also still hopes to have a say in the future of the burial site. Pennington was the first known black person to go to Yale Divinity School; during his days as a student there, Humphrey learned, he had been forced to sit in the back of the class as an observer and was never given a degree. Humphrey undertook a years-long crusade to rectify that omission, vowing that if he wasn’t successful he would write Pennington’s name on his own diploma. The school finally issued him a posthumous diploma in 2023. (In addition to attending Yale, Pennington earned an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University while living in Europe out of fear of being kidnapped back into slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.)

Like Reverend Detherage, Humphrey saw the push to acknowledge the burial ground as part of an effort to combat the willful obscuring of black history. “It’s not just a plot of land, it’s about a way of life and the culture that we have fostered in America, and they are trying to hide it,” he told me last year. Pennington’s family hopes that information about their ancestor can be posted at the site as part of some form of memorial, but also simply that there be a gravestone honoring the people who were buried there. “It’s going to be hard to distinguish every single name, but just something saying, ‘This is for the black bodies bound within a plot of land who have finally seen their truth,’” Humphrey said. “Everything must come to the surface. The light must touch soil for things to grow.”

On the way back to the train from my trip with McMenamin to the unmarked Elmhurst burial ground two years ago, I passed the white, wooden Reformed Church of Newtown—established in 1731 for a Dutch-speaking congregation. The churchyard is filled with pale, ancient headstones, some sunk halfway into the earth like melting sheets of ice. Those with visible inscriptions give the names of early settlers familiar from street signs around the city: Remsen, Rapelye, Polhemus, Van Brunt. A grave bearing the name Suydam was partially obscured by the branches of a squat fig tree; a sign out front advertised services in Mandarin and Taiwanese. 

Across the road an old woman held onto a black wrought iron fence outside another cemetery, tossing nuts to squirrels. One dashed away among the graves and climbed on top of one of several headstones that read RIKER, a name that stretches through the city’s past and continues to organize its present, connecting a remote farm to the nearby jail, America’s last penal colony. May all who built or thrived or suffered in our world be so remembered. The squirrel stood in profile, still as statuary, its gray fur blending in with the granite as it clasped its prize. Acorns for resurrection.