Entries tagged with “cemeteries” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

We're pleased to join with a group of other NYC blogs in a collaboratively produced 2009 holiday guide. See the bottom of this entry for links to participating sites.

How about putting a little history in your holiday basket? Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is a perennial favorite around these parts.

Nissenbaum, in a highly entertaining narrative, shows not only that the American version of the holiday has been commercial from the start (the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was a late arrival on that front), but also that it's what you'd call an "invented tradition." All the bits about Dutch origins were part of an effort among nineteenth-century New York gentry -- the self-anointed Knickerbocker set -- to create a colonial cultural heritage for themselves by establishing the social preeminence of their Dutch lineage, real or imagined. A byproduct: Santa Claus was able to sidestep an earlier Puritan bias against celebrating Christmas in the American colonies. Cyrus has summarized Nissenbaum's argument here before, but Santa Claus was smuggled into New York by the group of patricians also responsible for the New-York Historical Society (especially John PIntard) and writer-friends such as Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore.

Irving doesn't need so much introduction, but many readers may not have heard of Moore, or if they have they know him only for his poem "A Visit from St. Nicolas," more familiarly known by its first line: "Twas the night before Christmas." But Moore left his imprint all over the city, especially in Chelsea, the neighborhood named after his family estate. (His father was both the president of Columbia College and New York's Protestant Episcopal Bishop; his grandfather, a British officer, had purchased farmland in Chelsea in the 1750s, but the Moores had owned land in Queens since the 1650s.) After graduating Columbia as valedictorian in 1798, Moore dabbled in belles lettres and anti-Jeffersonian pamphleteering, compiled a two-volume English-Hebrew lexicon, and donated the land for the General Theological Seminary, where he was a professor of classical languages for three decades. (The seminary still stands, filling the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues between West 20th and 21st Streets.)

Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is especially good on making Moore's famous "A Visit from St. Nicolas," written in 1822, come alive in new ways. Ever wonder why the poem's narrator was so quick to spring from his bed to see what was the matter (rhymes with "clatter")? He probably thought a house-break was in progress. Christmas in early nineteenth-century New York, Nissenbaum suggests, had started to take on some of the elements of English seasonal misrule. But what had traditionally served as an escape valve -- allowing laborers to let off some steam but ultimately keeping social order in check -- was turning increasingly violent as a new industrial order demanded more of workers without giving much back. The mobs of working-class carolers who had traditionally demanded that rich folk bring them some figgy pudding -- insisting that they wouldn't leave until they get some -- were evolving into "Callithumpian bands" parading in the street making noise and committing acts of petty larceny. (One contemporary described these roving bands as made up of "Negroes, servants, boys, and other disorderly persons.")

I won't give much more away, but Nissenbaum argues that the significance of Moore's poem was to silence a little of that seasonal clatter, tame it to protect polite audiences. Santa Claus is a housebreaker, sure, but he's bringing gifts for the kiddies. The "patron-client exchange" that had defined seasonal misrule ("We won't go until we get some!") shifted to a parent-child exchange that made Christmas a domestic holiday rivaled only by the invented tradition of American Thanksgiving, taking shape around the same time. Moore's poem helped make Christmas "a practical simple ritual that almost any household could perform." The upshot: we have nineteenth-century New Yorkers, not seventeenth-century New Amsterdammers or their Old World parents, to thank for the cult of St. Nick and for Christmas trees. (Speaking of Christmas trees ...)

How to thank Mr. Moore? You might, like Cyrus's family, make his poem part of your own holiday ritual. (He recommends the pop-up edition by Robert Sabuda.) Or try one of these annual Moore Advent events:

Chelsea Community Church (346 W. 20th St.) holds an annual candlelight service and reading of Moore's poem. This year's event happens on December 13 at 6 pm. According to the NYC Parks & Rec website, at the nearby Clement Clarke Moore Park (W 22nd St. at 10th Ave.), neighborhood folk gather on the Sunday before Christmas for a reading of his poem. A similar event takes place uptown, in Washington Heights, at the Church of the Intercession (155th St. and Broadway), where people gather for carols, a reading of Moore's poem, and a candlelight march to Moore's grave site, in the Trinity Cemetery on 155th Street. This celebration has apparently been going on since 1911; this year it takes place December 20 at 4 pm.

A few other historically oriented seasonal suggestions:

If you'd like to seek out a patrician New York Christmas that predates Moore's poem (and hence is decidedly not Santa-centered), check the seasonal calendar for the eighteenth-century Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx.

Jewish historians of Christmas, Episcopalian compilers of Hebrew lexicons, and Tin Pan Alley's Jewish Christmas Broadway musicals notwithstanding, maybe Christmas just isn't your thing? Then you probably already know the traditional alternative for December 25 is dim sum. We're not exactly sure when this practice started, but the big decision, these days, is whether to go with Jing Fong or Golden Unicorn. When you're finished eating, work off some calories on Big Onion's 19th Annual Dec. 25 walking tour of the old Jewish Lower East Side.

George Balanchine's Nutcracker has been a tradition in New York City since 1954. The very thought may make you yawn. If so, did you know that Uptown Dance Academy has been performing Black Nutcracker since 1995? Catch it at the Apollo Theater on December 22nd; proceeds go toward a new studio for the kids.

If you'd like to revive a non-commercial historic NYC holiday tradition, try "calling on" (visiting) as many friends as possible on New Year's Day. You'll need to bring the equivalent of a photographic calling card to leave behind. I suppose you could do something like this on Facebook, but we're fans of the slow media version that requires actual travel from house to house. We wrote about it last holiday season, as did our friend Esther at Ephemeral New York.
   
A final suggestion for those who'd prefer to bring a little misrule back to your yule: you might consider joining in the annual Parade of Santas in Santacon NYC 2009, on December 12. Be warned: though some participants will be decked out in period costumes, you may also encounter pub crawlers with puke in their beards. (Putting the ho back in ho! ho! ho! since 1994. A little Santacon history here.) We suggest it in the spirit of the nineteenth-century Callithumpian bands, mentioned above. 

Discover lots more in the 2009 "NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays" Guide:

Brooklyn Based: Home for the Holidays
Give and Get: Tis The Season to Volunteer
the improvised life: unwrapping the holidays
Manhattan User's Guide: The Gift Guide
Mommy Poppins: Offbeat and Multicultural Family Holiday Events
NY Barfly: It's the Holidays, Time to Drink
NewYorkology: Big-ticket holiday shows: Nutcracker, Rockettes, Wintuk
offManhattan: Ten Holiday Getaways Near NYC
the skint: 30 days of skintmas - a cheap (or free!) holidays-in-nyc-treat for every day of the season
The Strong Buzz: Holiday Eats Old and New
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Happy Freakin' Holidays Playlist
Walking Off the Big Apple: The Thin Man Walk: A New York Holiday Adventure with Nick and Nora Charles

If you write a NYC-oriented blog and would like to contribute to a future group post, please let us know!

Cat over at WSP Blog got the scoop on a tombstone unearthed last Friday during the newest phase of park renovations. Boldface and links are Cat's:

Matt Kovary grew up in Greenwich Village, is working nearby and passes by the location every day. He contacted WSP Blog on Friday after walking by the Park that afternoon when he noticed that there was a large hole dug about 6 feet below the surface in the fenced-off construction area, right at the perimeter of the chain-link fence on the southern edge at Washington Square South and Sullivan Street.

According to Mr. Kovary, there were two people inside the fence, a man and a woman, poring over and dusting off what appeared to be a tombstone which he believed had been recovered from the hole. They were taking pictures of it, and, when he asked whether it was indeed a tombstone, the woman would only state that it was "sandstone," admitting she was not authorized to talk about it.

Mr. Kovary said that the artifact looked like "a tombstone, not unlike those you'd see at Trinity Church - but in much better condition." He wondered if it could have been "related to the original land owner" and questioned whether this came from a "family cemetery" from 200 years ago or more.

Although skeletons and human bones from the Park's time period as a "potter's field" (1797-1825) have been discovered as recently as last year (see WSP blog entry "The Skeletons of Washington Square Park"), there seems to be less information about - and discovery related to - private cemetery usage before the area was a New York City park.

UPDATE

Inside the Apple adds this insight:

It is well-known that the park was once a potter's field and by some estimates up to 20,000 people were buried there. (We write about the park's early history in depth in Inside the Apple.) However, what has people scratching their heads is the fact that you don't normally find a tombstone in a potter's field.

The tombstone isn't so mysterious, however. Only a portion of today's park was the potter's field. As Luther Harris writes in his wonderful book, Around Washington Square:

The land area [of the original square]...was about 6-1/4 acres, a respectable public space, but not a grand one. Much narrower than today's square, the potter's field was limited on the east by a strip of church cemeteries, and on the west by Minetta Creek, which ran southwest from the foot of Fifth Avenue to the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth Street. (italics added)

Thus, it seems likely considering where the current excavations are happening that what's been unearthed is a tombstone from one of these church graveyards. The Scotch Presbyterian Church owned the largest cemetery and vehemently opposed the park's usurpation of their land. Perhaps this is one of their brethren? We await a full report.

So do we. What a fun Halloween gift!

Previously on AHNY.

The Bowery Boys have been busy recently chronicling the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed much of the area now known as the financial district. Don't miss their thrilling podcast or the follow-up post from today recounting a tremendous explosion in a munitions warehouse a decade later, a devastating reprise to the blaze.

I've long been fascinated by the ways in which the Great Fire's scars are still visible. Walk down Wall Street, for instance, and almost everything dates from the immediate aftermath: huge Greek Revival structures built of stone -- as little wood used in construction as possible, so as never to feed such a fire again. (Bowery Boys borrow the map at the right from CUNY's Virtual NY entry on the fire.)

I'd taken the devastation sort of personally, too. When I spent a couple summers in the city doing my dissertation research (for the project that would later become my book, Republic of Intellect), I'd take the train downtown after the N-YHS closed and walk distances mentioned in the diaries and letters I was working with. How long did it take to get from Cedar to the Battery? What would a late-eighteenth-century walker in the city have seen? Heard? Smelled?

I also visited cemeteries at Trinity and St. Paul's, looking for names I knew, or taking in just how many headstones bore the dates of yellow fever outbreaks (1798, 1805, etc.). I was particularly eager to find the burial place of my project's chief protagonist, a young Connecticut-born physician and poet named Elihu Hubbard Smith, the organizing force in the club I was writing about. Smith had died in the 1798 epidemic, and I'd seen references to him being buried at the Presbyterian Church on Wall Street.

Problem was, there was no Wall Street Presbyterian Church to be found; nor was there any sign of its cemetery. Even though I knew Trinity was Episcopalian rather than Presbyterian, I checked its cemetery's burial register anyway, just in case, but as expected I had no luck. Dissertating in a pre-Google Books age, I gently set aside the question of where Smith's body now lay and went on to wrap things up and graduate.

A few years later, and a lot more ephemera on the Internet, I returned briefly to the question of Smith's burial as I was preparing the book for publication. I learned from some Presbyterian Church websites that the Wall Street Church had been lost in the Great Fire. (You can see it in the fore to the right in this 1824 image; Trinity lurks in the background.) I assumed its graveyard was overbuilt when the church was replaced by whatever stone structure sprung up at number 5 Wall Street. I even tried to correspond with some official church historians to find out if they knew about graves being moved, but with no luck. Would some descendant of Smith's sisters have dug him up and carted him back to Connecticut? I'd probably never know.

Though I'm long since done with the book on Smith and his circle, The Bowery Boys podcast scratched the itch to know where Smith's body rests. I tried googling a bunch of related terms, and these days, thanks mostly to Google Books, there's a lot more online. I gather the cemetery remained on Wall Street until 1844, when according to one book on NYC graveyards, it was "removed" -- but to where? Even more intriguing, I found a lead via the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, which apparently has a manuscript blueprint of the Wall Street cemetery. At least I can find out where in the cemetery he would have been. I'll have to become a member to go access the document, but I should probably be a member anyway, right? (If I had been writing a different sort of history I would probably have become one to complete the book.) By coincidence, the Society is currently having a moving sale, and all the titles from its online store are 50% off the listed price through the end of the month -- an appealing offer if slogging through the names of the dead sounds like good times.   

WNET Channel 13, our local PBS affiliate, recently launched a blog/online video series/vlog, "The City Concealed," in which they send film crews and producers into New York's hidden nooks and crannies. (They also take requests for where to go next; and they have a distinguished blogroll to boot!)

Two episodes have appeared so far, the most recent a fascinating underground tour of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery:

Green-Wood Cemetery is best known as the final resting place of famous New Yorkers like Boss Tweed, the Steinway family, and Leonard Bernstein, but it's also a treasure trove of hidden sculpture and architecture.

Established in 1838, Green-Wood Cemetery became a destination for American and European tourists. Every year, thousands flocked to the cemetery to enjoy its lush gardens, rolling hills, and stately tombs. Unfortunately, during New York City's financial woes of the late sixties and early seventies, the cemetery restricted public access and lost its reputation as an urban oasis of art and nature.

Over the last decade, however, the cemetery has made efforts to invite the public back inside, hosting concerts, film screenings, and tours. Still, access to the most fascinating sites -- inside the tombs and catacombs -- remains extremely limited. That's why we called Jeff Richman, Green-Wood Cemetery's historian, who wields the massive, dungeon-like key ring that unlocks the granite portals behind which lie the dead.

Viewers may be most interested in the peek inside the cemetery's vault system, whole rooms of family coffins stacked like that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Okay, so not quite that bad; and though the cemetery does host "catacombs," they're not quite on the scale or model of the ones in Paris.) The vault system features prominently at other old NYC cemeteries -- notably Trinity Church (which is why the graveyard towers so high above Church Street in the rear: it's hollow and filled with bodies, not the secret underground tunnels of the Illuminati!) and one of my favorite small, private cemeteries, the New York City Marble Cemetery on East 2nd Street (between First and Second), where a good friend was married -- not buried -- last fall.

In case you were wondering, though: You won't find Melville at Green-Wood, in spite of the fact that the cemetery's chapel hosted readings of the Father Mapple sermon last year. No, for a Melville pilgrimage (you know you've always wanted to make one!) you'll have to head up to Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the city's other magnificent "rural" cemetery.

To arrange your own (live!) tour of Green-Wood, click here. Photo from the Times's Paper Cuts blog.

Do you know Kevin Walsh's Forgotten New York?

I've had a copy for a year or so, and every once in a while remember to pack it with me when I'm heading to an unfamiliar neighborhood. (There's also an accompanying blog, cheerfully cluttered, that's well worth checking regularly.)

The book offers hundreds of out-of-the-way or in-plain-sight-but-easily-overlooked details from the city's past, broken into categories like "Truly Forgotten," "Quiet Places," or "What's This Thing?" It's  designed for New Yorkers rather than tourists; it's for people constantly on the look for little glimpses into lost parts of the city.

I rarely use the book to find a destination for an afternoon outing, say, but when I pack it along it always adds a nice dimension to a trip to or from somewhere I already wanted to go. A few weekends ago, ssw and I took our bikes and headed up the paths along the Hudson. We weren't sure how far we'd go, though we had a vague idea we wanted to go kayaking up at Pier 96 before the weather turned. Once we were done (and had spent enough time spread out in the sun to dry our asses off) we got back on our bikes and headed up as high as St. Clair Place, around 125th street.

I had my copy of FN in my basket, and vaguely had some idea that we were close to Grant's Tomb, which we'd never managed to visit. So we circled around until we hit Riverside Drive, pumped our way up the rather steep hill, and made our way back a few blocks to 123rd St.

Do you know who's buried at Grant's Tomb? I'm sheepish to admit I didn't know the answer to that riddle until we visited with FN's assistance.

One minor disappointment, though. I remembered, when the Hudson River path hit St. Clair Place and we decided to stop our journey north, that FN had an entry explaining that street's name. It accompanies the entry on Grant's Tomb, in fact. It has to do not with the more famous tomb, but with an obscure grave nearby:

Five-year-old St. Clair Pollock was playing on the rocks overlooking the Hudson River on the Pollock property, and fell to his death on July 15, 1797. When the Pollocks later sold the property, his father (perhaps his uncle; records are unclear) made the request that St. Clair's grave, which was on the property, would always be respected. A small stone urn remains marked, "Erected to the memory of an amiable child." St. Clair is also commemorated with the very short St. Clair Place, which runs between the Hudson River and West 125th Street under the Riverside Drive Viaduct, about a half mile to the north.

We only spent about 15 minutes looking for it, but we couldn't find the little stone urn, which is supposedly a little ways "up Riverside" (I assumed that meant north), "standing by itself, surrounded by an iron fence."

I suppose I'll have to go back and look again. Tip for bikers: ride back downtown as far as you can along Riverside Drive itself, which is somewhat more spectacular than I would have imagined and certainly lusher than a ride along the river at that point.