The Park Built Over a Graveyard

The green lawns and marble arch ahead sit on top of one of the largest unmarked cemeteries in New York. From the late seventeen hundreds until the eighteen twenties, this ground served as the city's potter's field, a public burial ground for the unclaimed, the unidentified, and the poor, along with wave after wave of victims from the yellow fever epidemics that regularly swept through lower Manhattan. Historians estimate that somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand bodies were buried here during that span, and most of them are still down there, under the paths where people walk their dogs today.

Tour guides love to point out the old elm tree at the park's northwest corner and call it the Hangman's Elm, claiming prisoners from a nearby jail were hanged from its branches in front of crowds. The story is a good one, but it does not hold up well. Researchers have traced the earliest references to that nickname only as far back as the late eighteen hundreds, decades after the hangings supposedly happened, and property records show the tree actually stood inside a private backyard until the city bought the land in the eighteen twenties. No public execution record ties to that specific tree at all. The one documented hanging connected to this general area involved a woman named Rose Butler in eighteen twenty, and even that took place on a gallows roughly five hundred feet away, on the far side of a creek that used to cut through the park.

So that tree is almost certainly innocent. The ground underneath the rest of the park, though, is exactly what it has always been rumored to be, a cemetery that New York simply built a park on top of and kept walking.