Forgotten New York explores famous New York City cemeteries, giving you a tour of the historic resting places of so many New Yorkers. Check out the celebrity tombstones, hidden burial sites, mausoleums and places like Calvary and Greenwood Cemetery.
There are a total of seventeen cemeteries in Cypress Hills on either side of the Brooklyn-Queens border. It’s a hilly area, where thousands of years ago a glacier was stopped…
James H. Hackett (1800-1871), whom Abraham Lincoln called his favorite actor, reposes at Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens, under a fallen monument. The Prospect Cemetery Association hopes to restore it soon.…
When the Commissioners’ Plan for the grid system of NYC streets was adopted in 1811 and John Randel Jr. set about surveying the island as related in the Museum of…
In the mid-19th Century Manhattan was getting so crowded (by 1845 the island was fully built up south of about 42nd Street) that it was running out of cemetery space.…
Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace and Kensington, has proven to be a Forgotten favorite — this was the 3rd such Green-Wood…
Queens is dotted with minuscule cemeteries, some still existing, some as dead as the people who were buried within, whose remains are blown in the breeze now. Corona used to have…
When I moved to Flushing in 1993, Martin’s Field, 46th Avenue and 164th-165th Streets, was just another playground: a desultory concrete space, with broken swings and a curious weedy green…
Well, your webmaster finally made the team picture after 29 ForgottenTours. Can you spot where I am?* As usual, despite sunny weather predicted all week, ForgottenTour Day turned out cloudy, chance…
April 1, 2007, didn’t fool 48 ForgottenFans…second-most ever on a ForgottenTour (the prize goes to the 56 who turned up for Tour 14 in Dumbo, October 2003)…who turned up for FNY’s jaunt…
Whenever I lead a ForgottenTour through a cemetery (like Green-Wood Cemetery, Tour 24) I always tell people to peek in the windows of the mausolea. More often than not, you’ll…
Forgotten Fans wave with Minerva In what was undoubtedly the best weather ever for a ForgottenTour (sunny and 68) forty Forgotten fans (and one heckler!) converged on Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a…
Maurice and 54th Avenues, Mt. Zion Cemetery with a waste disposal plant overlooking it. In the 1850s, NYC decided it didn’t want its dead anymore. Rising real estate costs and…