The Green and What Lies Beneath It

The sixteen-acre rectangle at the center of New Haven has been in continuous public use since the city was founded. It has served as a marketplace, a drill ground, a fairground, a political gathering place, and the site of a succession of state houses built and torn down over two centuries. The three churches that stand along its upper edge, Center Church, United Church, and Trinity Church, were all completed within three years of each other in the eighteen-teens. Trinity Church, finished in eighteen fifteen, is considered the first large-scale Gothic Revival building in the United States.

But the Green holds something else as well. For its first hundred and fifty years, it was New Haven's principal burial ground. Thousands of people were interred beneath its grass. When a new cemetery was opened on Grove Street in seventeen ninety-six, prompted partly by a yellow fever outbreak that had overwhelmed the old ground, the headstones were eventually relocated there. The bodies were not.

Between four thousand and five thousand people remain buried under the New Haven Green. They include Benedict Arnold's first wife. They include James Pierpont, one of the founders of Yale. They include generations of ordinary New Haveners whose names appear in no other record.

The crypt beneath Center Church contains the identified remains of roughly one hundred thirty-seven individuals in brick vaults, along with the likely remains of more than one thousand others. You can visit the crypt on certain weekends. The ceiling of the church above you is the floor of the nave. The windows let in a thin gray light.

In two thousand twelve, when Hurricane Sandy brought down a large oak tree on the Green, a human skeleton emerged from the roots.