Forgotten New York

LEVERICH CEMETERY, JACKSON HEIGHTS

ONE of Queens’ best-kept secrets can be accessed via  a driveway at 35th Avenue at 71st Street between an animal hospital and a Chinese restaurant. Walk right in past a selection of garages and back doors to businesses on 35th Avenue up to a mural depicting a young woman holding a miniature planet earth, and walk up to the gate which is festooned with yellow ribbons, and peer inside.

This is the ancient burial ground of the Leverich family. William Leverich emigrated to Newtown in 1663 from England and the burial ground was once part of the settlement belonging to his son Caleb. He built his homestead in 1670 and it stood until 1909. Though headstones were recorded by historian James Riker in the 1890s, all of them have disappeared by now and the cemetery has not accepted any burials since 1870, the Leverich family having dispersed decades ago. The name is still prominent on this 1909 Queens map of the Jackson Heights area, however. 

Thomas Leverich, a family descendant living in Connecticut, researched and wrote a lengthy treatise on the burial ground’s history. The New York City Cemetery Project has more information and maps. 

After years as a dumping ground, the Jackson Heights Beautification Group has cleaned up the space of debris and planted the flowers and flora you see there today. 

Leverich Cemetery is not the only remnant of the former tenancy of the Leverich family in these parts. A short street, Leverich Street, angles southeast between 35th Avenue and 35th Road. There are a few buildings on the street that appear to be older than the rest, along with an apartment building named for Andrew Jackson…for whom Jackson Heights is not named. Instead, Jackson Heights is named for the man who built Northern Boulevard.

Northern Boulevard was built in 1859, and opened to traffic in 1860, between what is now Vernon Boulevard and the Flushing River by the Hunter’s Point, Newtown and Flushing Turnpike Company. It connected to roads further east past the Flushing River, but the newly built stretch was named Jackson Avenue for the turnpike company’s construction supervisor, John C. Jackson. By 1920, most of the road had been renamed Northern Boulevard, with the westernmost section between Vernon Boulevard and Queens Plaza retaining the old name.

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8/30/23

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